I walk whenever I can. My daily goal is ten thousand steps. That usually amounts to close to five miles. Yesterday I decided to take a slightly different route that led me across Gates Creek and up an abandoned roadway leading to what used to be called Hogue’s Hill. I remember riding up this hill with my father in an automobile in the 1950’s. Mr. Hogue had a tree farm up on this hill and we purchased blue spruce trees from him to plant around the perimeter of our yard.
The road reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem about “The Road Not Taken.”
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not 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;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.