If I had stayed.

My huaband and I go out to our country place for a day. It's been a while since I was there and I am eager to see our place again, even though it is falling to the ground.

Our wonderful neighbor has a house that is more like a museum. It is a folk art assemblage of fantastic pieces he has collected over the years. Truly amazing pieces that are arranged fastidiously.

He is a generous person who always has a little mini rummage sale and free table on his front porch. I gaze over the assemblage of objects and pick out the well carved wooden piece of an old woman. A carved piece of wood of an old woman clutching her shawl about her. She gazes at me, smiling with her wrinkles lined up with the grain of the wood.
Smiling and old, just the way I would look had I stayed. Had I stayed in the old cottage that would be me now. Walking the island byways and paths with my old shawl clutched round me.
would i be married? ( ah..that handsome redhaired man I fancied?) or would i be a single woman, living out a hermit's life in my old cottage...
"ah faith going on 30 years now, the creature...ah yes, she came years ago and just never left...ah the creature...she goes to mass regular...she does...some say she's an american..but faith if she isn't an islander now."

yes. Thirty years could have passed on by, and I could still be there. Tending my fire, and perhaps having written my book I would be fine so.

There in wood is carved the life I never led, had I stayed on the island...yes, carved in wood there is the woman I never became.

she rests now, on my table, in a small beautiful bowl of walnut halves...kind of an Irish Venus rising up from some kind of inner beauty....all carved and wrinkled...lines in her face like the grain of wood she is carved from...

That could have been me. Instead I pick up a reminder from a friend's table. Musing on what might have been.