The Road Not Taken

This story is by Laura Porter Taylor and was part of our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

There comes a time when forgotten words from a poem in a literature class or read as a child come back to haunt you, like a much-loved song you can’t stop playing. My youthful, energetic life was running at full speed, and in what seemed like a nanosecond, I married, divorced, remarried, my parents died, I had married children and grandchildren, then they moved away. Sometimes, they remember to call on birthdays and holidays.

This morning, I looked in the mirror. The reflection staring back at me was a 60-something woman whose 25-year-old brain silently screamed, “What the hell happened?”

Then Robert Frost’s words in The Road Not Taken arise from the ashes of my youth.

I am at yet another crossroads in life. Not the first one I’ve come to, but I didn’t realize this one would arrive so quickly; the inevitable downsizing older people face when life unceremoniously discards them.

It’s late February. The chill gray skies reflect my sullen mood. Cold, dismal, with no hope of saving the daffodils lured out of their bulbs by the siren song of the warmth of false spring a few days ago. But winter slithered in again, and they crumpled into mush, their once glorious yellow heads wilted. Just like me. A wrinkled, wilted daffodil parsing through inconsequential items so my sons aren’t burdened once I’m gone.

I look at each item, remembering where it came from, when I acquired it, and how long it has languished in the cool darkness of the closet. Some will go to charity, others into the “things I can live without but am not sure I want to” pile. Then there are items I’ve kept for inexplicable reasons.

There is a clattering patter against the windowpane. The hard winter rain has returned. Glancing at the “save” pile, I decide I’ll quit for today. I’m tired, lonely, and the remembrances nag at my heart. Perhaps I can get more done tomorrow. But I know better. Stopping now will only put off the inevitable. As I reach for the closet light switch, I see it. I forgot it was here.

 Turn off the light and shut the door.

I should listen to the voice in my head, but the one in my heart speaks louder. As I step onto the stool to reach a forgotten box, decades-old memories rush over me in an unexpected tsunami of voices from the past.

 “Mama? Can we go upstairs and look in the box?”

“Libba, we just got in,” my mother said in the exasperated tone she used when she was tired. We traveled all day to her ancestral home in the small Appalachian mountain village where she grew up. It would take two hours to get the house ready for my grandmother’s summer residency here.

I should have waited to ask her, but the box lined with blue tissue paper beckoned like bears to honey in my preteen imagination. Inside it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.

I was 12 that summer, and I worked hard to help my grandmother. Mama promised to open the box for me if I helped Mimi freeze June apples, which took a week. One night, I waited until after dinner, my foot thumping the table leg in anticipation.

“Honey, stop that. You’re making me nervous,” my mother said, putting her hand on my knee to silence the irritating noise. “What’s eating you?”

“Can we…look inside the box tonight?”

“We’ve got dishes to wash…” She paused, then smiled. “Well, alright. I suppose you’ve earned it.”

Racing up the old mahogany staircase, I flew to the room where Mama kept it. My sister trudged along behind, less enthusiastic. She’d rather be torturing doodlebugs.

I wriggled with excitement as Mama opened the lid. She removed the blue tissue paper, then held up a white taffeta, lace, and tulle dress with thousands of tiny seed pearls sewn into the bodice. It was her wedding gown.

“Oh, Mama, I can’t wait to get married so I can wear it!” I reached over to touch the frothy skirt.

“Can I see the veil, too?”

She unwrapped a small package neatly wrapped in blue paper. It was a Juliet cap, also covered in seed pearls, with a tiered net veil behind it–like the one Jacquelyn Kennedy wore on her wedding day. Mama put the cap and veil on her head and struck a silly pose as if she were at the altar.

My sister sniffed imperiously. “I’m not wearing that. Frilly dresses are for sissies. I’d rather work with Jane Goodall or be a famous author.”

“Well, I am,” I said, my hand again touching the beautiful gown. “I want to be a princess like Mama was when she married Daddy.”

Mama returned the dress and veil to the box and smoothed the blue tissue paper as if it were the finest silk. Melly disappeared, off to catch fireflies or to scare up some unfortunate toad she’d seen earlier that day.

“Mama, will I look as beautiful as you did?”

She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Of course you will, honey. Come on now. We need to wash the supper dishes.”

Ten years later, the box sat on my mother’s dining table, and I glared at it contemptuously. I had reached my first adult crossroads. At 22, I was engaged to a military officer my parents loved, but whom I barely knew. We met six months previously; I hadn’t quite completed undergraduate school and was a long way from law school. I wasn’t in love with him and there wasn’t an iota of chemistry between us. But pleasing one’s parents, the curse of the eldest child, was my weakness. All they could see for me was life as an officer’s wife, with travel to far-away exotic countries. So I said yes to his proposal.

As for the dress, a lifetime had passed in ten years. Young women were wearing wedding gowns with short sleeves, made of dotted Swiss summer voile, without trains, and not encrusted with thousands of seed pearls. Unfashionable Juliet caps had not yet arisen like a Phoenix from dusty ancestral attics.

“Mama, I am not wearing this thing,” I said, as my mother dropped the mid-century modern dress over my head. “It’s hot, itchy and two sizes too big.”

“You most certainly are,” my mother mumbled, pins between her lips. “We can’t afford a new dress. Besides, you’ve wanted to wear this since you were a little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl anymore.”

“That’s not the issue. For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, stand still while I fit the cap and veil.”

Determined to assert some measure of independence, I snapped and stamped my foot in irritation. 

“Did you not hear me? I refuse to wear that hideous thing!” 

“Then don’t!” she retorted, angrily snatching the veil from my head and hurling it into the box.

Unspoken words stuck in my throat like flies on flypaper.

Mama, I’m frightened. Please tell me what to do.

The rain has stopped. Echoes of past disagreements and decisions fade away. A ray of sunshine streams across the sleeping gray-brown grass, making small rainbows through droplets hanging from the bare branches of cherry trees that were more circumspect than their daffodil compatriots. My now wiser eyes look at the dress my mother and I fought so vociferously over so many years ago. She would have canceled the wedding had I voiced my despair about my uncertainty. She never wanted me to be unhappy.

My veined, older fingers trace the intricate patterns of thousands of seed pearls. The only other reminder of that day is a photograph of me with my father. I look like a frosted white cupcake, my head covered with a tulle and lace mantilla that didn’t suit the dress, but the look between us is one of love and fatherly devotion. The marriage didn’t last. The dress did. Ever true to herself, my sister married at a nondescript city courthouse in a sleek magenta-colored suit. After my inevitable divorce and graduation from law school, I married a man who still adores me. We have no daughters. My granddaughter won’t wear this relic if she marries at all 25 years hence. I should relegate it to the charity pile. But my reluctant heart hesitates.

Returning the dress to its cardboard coffin, I smooth the ancient folds of blue paper over the gown and shut the lid forever, realizing this crossroads is no different from others I’ve happened upon during the last six decades. Resolutely, I place the box on the charitable pile. Yet, I wonder…would my life be different if my parents eloped? With no dress to dream about all those years, would my ill-fated first marriage have occurred? What if I’d walked down Frost’s metaphorical road less taken?

There is a mystical, glorious grace in the unknown. I will take what could be the last turn in my life’s journey headlong into it.