The Road Less Taken (he's gonna kill me for this)

 

"We've never been on this road before, have we?"

Scoffing..."You've been on this road before. Wait til you see where it comes out. You're gonna laugh..."

The nicely paved but winding road turns suddenly and unexpectedly to bluish clay and stone, marred only by many buggy wheels. The car rumbles noisily over the tiny ruts that they make.

"Um, okay, we haven't been on this road before."

You are right, senior, and there is a snow and mud bank right across it where the town plows stopped, along with a seasonal use only sign.

Still it looks pretty good. And it goes in the right direction and all. We creep over the corner of the bank and just barely sneak neatly around it onto what seems to be an okay road.

Soon we pass a young Amishman carrying his lunch pail. He looks at us askance.

We continue, clattering along between fields of clay plowed into pillowy brown humps, with stray stems of last year's crop poking up here and there. It is barren and lonely-seeming land, pretty stark for Upstate NY.

We crest over the edge of a small hill..........

To find that the road winds down through some woods into a swampy place still covered with a foot of snow, through which some sort of horse-drawn machinery has clearly passed, but no cars.

I start noping vociferously. "No, no, no, we are not going down there. No way, no how, nope, nope, nope."

Thankfully I am married to someone turned wise by the seasons, and also an experienced farmer who can back up as well as he can go forward.

"Go ahead, say it," he tells me, when he finds a place to turn around, after much backing and filling.

But no, I am grateful that he is not a young rutting buck who would have just had to try it even if it went wrong. We had places to go and deadlines to meet.

Wish you could have seen the look the Amish lad gave us as we passed him again on the way out.