ROADS
NOT TAKEN
Prologue - Stars
(originally posted June 12, 2007)
The soft breeze wafted
across the open land between the Manor House and Crabapple Farm.
Its welcoming coolness found the face of a woman sitting on the porch
swing of the old farmhouse. She
sighed contentedly and closed her eyes, memories flooding back to her on this,
her 60th birthday. Behind her the
house was full of activity, the cleanup after the birthday festivities.
She could hear her children and her grandchildren, all her family and
friends, happily chattering away as they washed and dried dishes and silverware,
moved extra chairs back to scattered corners, and returned the homey kitchen to
order again.
Her oldest grandchild
was 13 and shared the same birthday and the same party.
She was shooed out of the kitchen when she tried to help with the cleanup and came out to join her grandmother on the porch.
They had chatted amiably for several minutes then, after a few moments of
restless silence, Katie had declared she needed to walk off the abundant supper
and disappeared through the ancient orchard and into the old game preserve.
She had tried to sound nonchalant about it but there was a look of
intense curiosity on her face as she had started out into the woods, one of her
uncle's Irish Setters faithfully trailing after her.
Her grandmother smiled wearily. At
least she came by her adventurous spirit honestly.
She wondered what kind
of condition the old clubhouse was in. It
had been almost a year since she had made the effort to hike up through the
woods to see it and even longer since it had been used by the Bob-Whites of the
Glen. Make no mistake, she was in excellent health for her age, but
time had taken its toll on her body (Too
early! she thought with a grimace), bringing arthritis to her knees
and back. She still tried to keep
active, but the days of walking to the clubhouse and remembering how much the
children had enjoyed it growing up were long past.
She still tended a small garden behind the farmhouse, but the upkeep of a
working farm was growing to be too much for her.
She had hopes one of her sons might want to move his family in and keep
Crabapple Farm in the family, as it had been for generations.
She'd happily offer it to her daughter, too, but she lived a different
life now in
How happy she was that
all of her family had been able to make it for this visit.
It was lonely living here at the farm alone.
It was nice to hear the old farmhouse alive with the sounds of laughter
again. She could hear a rumbling
noise from the family room. Probably
her grandsons, Josh and Sam, wrestling. Well,
the old family room could handle that. She
heard her best friend scolding her young granddaughters, who were fighting over
Barbie dolls. She heard her eldest
son calling for his daughter to be on his Trivial Pursuit team.
Too bad she was in pursuit of an adventure instead.
“Mom?”
It was her daughter, come to join her on the porch swing as the twilight fell
around them. “Where's Katie?”
“Off on an
adventure, of course,” she replied. They
both smiled, each remembering their own adventures on the Wheeler game preserve.
The young woman linked arms with her mother and they sat in companionable
silence listening to the crickets harmonizing with the squeak of the swing as
the stars emerged one by one in the deepening blue sky.
“Tell me what Dad
used to say about the stars, Mom,” Danielle implored.
She had heard the story countless times but never tired of hearing it,
especially when her mother told it.
Trixie smiled and
squeezed Danielle's arm a little tighter. “Out here in the country
you can appreciate the stars, Danielle. You
can't see nearly so many in the city.” It was just a gentle reminder
to her daughter of one of the many glories of Crabapple Farm.
“Mom, that's not
what he used to say.”
She
leaned her head on her mother's shoulder. “And I know ... I know.”
Trixie's smile grew
melancholy as she remembered that long ago spring evening. “On the
night your father proposed to me we walked up along the lake on a night just
like this. When we got to the boathouse, he pulled me into his arms and
we looked up at the stars. And he
said, 'Trixie, every star has a story to tell.
Someday, years from now, we'll be able to look up at these same stars and
they'll remember every happiness, every adventure, every heartbreak.
When we're old, and start to forget all that has happened, they'll still
remember. And if we're quiet enough, we'll hear them telling those stories
back to us.'”
Danielle sighed
heavily. She missed her father.
Even though he'd been gone for almost ten years now, she still missed him
every day. She was several years
younger than her brothers, William and James, and they had more and clearer
memories of their father. But
hearing that story always brought him right back to Crabapple Farm. She could remember sitting on his lap on this same porch as
he told her that story, and she'd sit as still as she could, listening, waiting
for the stars to speak to her. She
could feel her father's presence there now and knew her mother felt it even more
strongly.
Trixie's eyes grew
misty as she remembered. She didn't
want to cry on her birthday, not with all the joy in the house.
She leaned her head back against the swing and stared up into the night
sky. Tell me those stories,
she asked the stars. Tell me
again how I came to be here...
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Author's Notes
PROLOGUE
(994 words)
This
is my first published fanfic of any kind. Feedback
is most welcome! You can be honest. You can be brutally honest.
But please don't be brutal.
The
title of what is turning out to be an epic is in homage to Robert Frost's poem,
The Road Not Taken.
I'm not a poetry nut, but I do love Robert Frost, and years ago memorized
several of his poems (including this one) for an English class.
Amazingly, I still remember most of them.
And the more I looked at other Robert Frost titles, the more I wanted to
let each chapter be a title (or variation) of one of those poems.
Thanks so much to Heather for her editing and
encouraging comments and suggestions. She
took care of the Prologue and first four chapters for me, and I hope she'll be
around for future chapters (yes, there will be more to this story).
I
have shamelessly used Barbie and Trivial Pursuit without permission.
Please don't sue me.
As
always, these characters originated with Julie Campbell and became (and remain)
the property of Random House. I
have created characters of my own, but regardless of whether they are mine or
RH's, I am not making any profit from my creative writing.