Have you ever had to make a choice between two routes while on a trip? Have you ever been distracted? Have you put something off that you’d like to do and then circumstances sent you a different direction?

Of course, you have. We all have been in those situations.

In my ongoing late-night walks with Archer, the wonder Sheltie dog, I’ve been continuing to attempt to learn some poetry. It’s a slow process.

Archer is sometimes a help, and sometimes a hindrance. He helps when he patiently looks at me with a kind, serious “you can do this” expression as I repeat over and over again lines from a poem. He hinders when he whines like a moronic dog (understandable) for another treat which he knows I have in my coat pocket.

We’ve recently been finishing up Robert Frost’s famous poem, “The Road Not Taken.” It’s not a super long poem, but the language is a bit tricky. It’s been a little difficult to find and clean out a cobwebby cubbyhole in my brain in which to get that poem deposited where it will “stick.”

Since the poem is now in the public domain, I could, if I wanted, lay out the entire thing right here. But I won’t. You can look it up, if you want.

The poem talks about choosing between two roads in the woods. After seeing what can be seen of the roads, the second road is taken. Here’s the part of “The Road Not Taken” that has had me thinking lately:

“…Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back…”

It’s the “way leads on to way” concept, that I believe is so relatable to us all. We’ve all made choices and decisions that have determined the course of our lives. We’ve left other “roads” behind “for another day,” but we’ve known we’ll probably never get back to them.

Those big, deep, lifechanging decisions could be examined here. But, I think I’ll keep that “for another day.”

Another version of “way leads on to way” is the getting distracted thing. One distracting thing leads to another.

A few days before he died, a few years ago, an LDS Church leader, Elder Von Keetch, told the following story in a meeting I attended. This is my remembrance of his story.

He told of one Saturday morning when he and his wife were to be at a mid-morning church event. He told his wife, Bernice, that he had a quick chore to do before he got ready to leave. He needed to spray the fruit trees in the back of their yard.

When he got to the shed where the equipment and supplies for spraying were, he discovered that the shed door was hanging by a single wood screw. He thought that he could hurry to the garage and get some replacement screws. He could quickly take care of the problem, so the door wouldn’t crash down on one of his kids.

Arriving at the garage, he found that his tools, screws, nuts and bolts, etc. were scattered all over the floor. The kids hadn’t put things away after doing something. He figured he could quickly gather things up and put things away. He didn’t want to get a flat tire from an odd nail or screw when he backed out of the garage.

In the process of gathering things up, he spotted the electrical tape. That reminded him that he had seen the insulation coming off of a wire on the hot tub when he had been out there with his sons the previous night. He’d better quickly take care of that before someone got electrocuted.

At the hot tub, he discovered that the boys had left the cover open and a couple of bushels of leaves had blown into the tub. Oh boy! If he didn’t hurry and get those out of there, they’d suck down into the pump and burn it up and ruin it.

The screen net for cleaning the hot tub was back at the shed in the corner of the lot. On his way there, the automatic sprinkling system came on. That was no big deal. He was used to dodging sprinklers. But, the head on one of the sprinklers popped off and there was a 25-foot geyser that needed immediate attention.

He could take care of that in quick order because he had an extra sprinkler head on hand. He shut off the water. He was lying in the mud, after having dug up the sprinkler, struggling with the water pipe when he heard something.

He heard the sound of his wife clearing her throat dramatically from the deck on the back of the house. He looked up at her from his position sprawled in the mud. She was in her Sunday best clothes and backlit by the sun, which was peeking over the roof of the house.

She asked, in a tone which showed she already knew the answer to the question, “Did we get distracted this morning?” Elder Keetch said that his thoughts went to a hope that this moment wasn’t a foreshadowing of things to come. He hoped that it wasn’t symbolic of him being left behind in the mud while his angel wife moved on to heaven.

As it happened, Bernice had given her husband enough warning that he had time to leave all the distractions behind and get cleaned up in time for the event. He was grateful.

His story taught several lessons, but the most important, I believe, is to not become so distracted with so many things that nothing of importance ever gets done. All of us face those kinds of challenges in our lives.

I guess we just need to acknowledge that the concept of “way leading onto way” comes with the territory of living life. Hopefully, we’ll minimize our time “in the mud” and enjoy the roads we choose to travel.

— Merrill

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