All The Difference

Sara closed the tattered album and set it aside along with the hopes that the faded pictures would transport her and her brothers back to a time where they were together long enough for a family picture. Their faces were so young and innocent and their father smiling and strong, the patriarch of the family, and it felt too long ago to be them. She wanted them to remember their father that way, not like the last year – those were his last wishes, or maybe his final fear.      

Their father chose this place and Sara imagined him sitting on a limestone outcropping, comfortable in his aloneness, she tried to hear the trees like he would, the wind tickling the sycamores that lined the Pedernales river, so low this time of year forcing the water to seek out deep crevasses carved over the ages. She wanted to smell the earthy soil and love the rugged landscape scattered with rocks and cactus. Just a few quiet last moments to be with him.       

There was just enough breeze and shade to make the Hill Country morning tolerable, but as the oldest of the three she knew she had to move things along; the encroaching sun and time were not on her side. 

“We need to read the poem,” she said, sounding a bit more authoritative than she intended. “The poem first, right?”   

“The Road Less Travelled,” Bert, her youngest brother said reading the words and sounding like Sherlock pondering a clue. He went by Robert these days, but their father loved to yell ‘Bert!’ as a baby, and it stuck. Fit him. 

“The Road Not Taken,” Thomas corrected him, without looking up. Sara suppressed the urge to explain how misunderstood the poem was over the years, but it was better to just get on with it and let them take whatever they could from the scenery, the poem, and their time together. 

“Why did he choose this poem?” Thomas said and tried to skip a stone across the water, but it was too shallow, and it flipped once and sank. “Dad wasn’t into poetry, was he”? 

“He wrote some,” was all Bert said. Thomas looked at him and Bert added, “I don’t remember any of it.” 

Three urns rested under the shade of a tree, just out of earshot of their voices, muffled and mixed with the harmony of the wind and water. One urn each. She noticed the boys trying hard not to glance in their direction. His direction.

Sara was standing but the boys were sitting, creating a teacher-student vibe that wasn’t helping things. She found a rock that was relatively flat and sat. Thomas stood, and then awkwardly stepped toward the water, his back to the others, or maybe the urns.   

The three had drifted apart, they gathered as families did to celebrate life, death, and holidays, but as their parents aged, the reasons not to get together outweighed their traditions. Taking care of their father over the last year divided them further as it could when one thought they were doing more than the other, and the other thought the same, or worse, resented the accusation. Working through the details of his final wishes threatened to seal their differences for eternity, and their father wasn’t making it easier today, but maybe that was his plan. In life, he was a man of few words, fewer needs, and guided the family gently with subtle wit and wisdom delivered in short interventions that made people think. Besides Bert, she smiled to herself.    

Thomas turned back to them, the poem in his hand, looking at it like he was seeing it for the first time, “Why is this verse highlighted?”

Sara looked at her copy as Bert looked over her shoulder, “Yours is different than mine.” Thomas walked over and they compared their versions of Robert Frost’s poem. 

“Dad made everything a game,” Sara said.

“Did he?” Thomas replied.

“Read the poem and spread the ashes,” Bert said. “Sounded simple back at the hotel.”

“Seems like we should do the ashes first,” Thomas said.  

“Yes, of course. I was caught up in the message he was sending.” Sara said. She wanted more time to think through her father’s last wishes, but the boys were getting restless.

Nobody moved. 

“I’ll go first,” Sara said and walked to the shade tree and picked up an urn. She looked at the other two urns to make sure there weren’t any instructions as to which one they should choose, then shook it off as overthinking things again. 

She walked to the bank and realized she would need to go a little further to reach the flowing water in the middle. Bert saw her dilemma and grabbed an urn and joined her. She removed the lid, jiggling the urn, and sprinkled some ashes into the flow, and watched the current carry it downstream. She wrinkled her nose. Bert followed with more of a clump that plopped in the water and splashed, and Thomas took a step back, shook his head and heaved his urn with more thrust and the ashes flew downstream; he seemed pleased with his effort.

“That was gross,” Sara said and walked away. The boys laughed and the moment lightened. 

“Now, for the reading,” Thomas said.

Sara didn’t ask and they didn’t question her reading it.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I couldn’t travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth:

“Should we each read our own section?” Bert asked.

Thomas jumped in:

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. 

“Well, is something supposed to happen?” Thomas picked up a twig and waved it over the water.

“I think dad is telling you that decisions on which road to take are permanent and you need to realize that if you drift away from the family, you won’t come back,” Sara said. 

“Is that dad telling me, or are you?” Thomas said.

She kept her eyes on the page and read:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

“Well, professor?” Thomas smiled.

“It doesn’t matter,” Sara said. She knew that her father wanted her to pursue her dreams and not let her sense of responsibility force her down the path that people expected her to take, but at this point, she wouldn’t say that to the others. They either knew or didn’t care, so it really didn’t matter. 

“Doesn’t seem like dad to lecture us from the beyond,” Bert said. 

Her father had chosen this place and these words as his final thoughts for his family. She wanted the words, the ashes, and the land to talk to her, to give them something from their father that would live on with them. The sun was almost overhead, the ashes wandering downstream, and her brothers glancing around as they did when they were done with a chore.   

“Dad always wanted to be an archaeologist,” Sara said.

“Or a forest ranger,” Bert laughed. 

“He had a great career,” Thomas added, and then added, “He seemed to be okay with it.”  

“So, it’s about him? Or, about us and him?” Bert was thinking out loud and Sara thought that was a step in the right direction.  Thomas turned towards Bert and then back to the poem. 

“So, the poem is about a guy that has two choices in life? You think that’s dad?” Thomas asked, posing his theory like a kid trying out ice skates for the first time. 

“Dad talked about other paths, so to speak, but never got around to it,” Sara said. “Life got in the way.” Thoughts of what that meant swirled in her mind like a flock of blackbirds that followed an unknown path in the sky, diving, climbing, then coming back together. 

“Oh, I kept the first for another day!” Thomas said with the enthusiasm of a person finding a piece of a puzzle that attached two sections. 

“And what did he keep for another day?” Bert asked.

“The poem implies he kept it for another day but never came back to it.” The sun was almost overhead creating an island of shade as their cover shrank around them. A drop of sweat ran down her side and she subtly rubbed her elbow against her shirt to absorb it. 

Bert came to her rescue, “I think we owe it to dad to at least try to understand what he wanted us to know. Okay, he starts out young and sees two paths for his life, and uh, thinks one is better than the other, and …?”

“We should have done this during happy hour,” Sara said. 

“I think,” Bert said with the enthusiasm of a charades player that figured out the unknowable flailing of arms clue, “that he is telling us about his life choices. Like we were talking about our own, he was explaining his own choices.”

“And?”

Bert looked to Sara as he often did. She listened to the river, wanting comfort from the bubbling ripple rhythm of water over rock. Her father chose this place, and everything had to mean something to him. Why had she let time slip by? One day they were at the boy’s football game, or vacationing in Mexico, and then suddenly the years passed like the blurred rail cars at a crossing, and she was helping him up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. He was a strong man, and men wanted to be remembered for what they did, and not as clumps floating down the river. Her father chose this place and this poem for a reason.

“And,” he repeated.

“And he wanted us to know that he made choices in life and looking back, either path was a good one, maybe he longed for the path he didn’t take, as we all do. Maybe, he wanted us to know about the path he didn’t take, and the path he did, and why.” She felt they were close. 

Thomas said, “He made sacrifices.” Sara thought that it was a sacrifice of sorts for Thomas to offer that. 

“Yes,” Bert agreed, and he read from the poem, “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in the woods, and I – / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

“So, he was looking back at his life and saying that although he didn’t take the path, he thought he would be on, the path he took was just as good? And that made all the difference?” Thomas asked. Sara thought that Thomas had more to gain than she or Bert today and more to lose. He had drifted away from the family, maybe because she had their father all to herself for her early years, and Bert had him because father realized that time had drifted by, like a lazy river, that flowed without concern of time or place, it just kept going and there was nothing one could do to slow it… or look back. 

“Yes, you got it, Thomas. He made decisions in his life and looking back, questioned them, but in the end, he thought either path was the right one, but the one he took made all the difference.”

“All the difference?”

The river flowed with its never-ending song, sometimes rushing and splashing, over-running the banks, other times struggling to find a path forward. Today it was enough. Her father could rest in peace as the water carried to the land he loved, delivered by those that loved him. 

“Us. We made all the difference for him.”