If

My beautiful, amazingly talented and totally crazy friend talked me into this Nanomowrimo project. You write a novel. In a month. No kidding. She's actually DONE it. So, I figure it must be physically possible. Maybe you just don't sleep. And really word count wise (50,000) it's a NOVELLA. But still, it's completely not a normal thing for an adult to voluntarily sign up to do.

So I'm in training. I decided the best thing to do to be ready (you write in November, all of November. We're doing corn dogs for Thanksgiving this year, kids) the best way to really get the prose in gear would be to focus on poetry. You know, clean lines, fast images. Good poetry. Today I read Frost and his whole road issue. You know, picking the road that was grassy, and it wanted someone to walk on it. And of course I wondered. Really, what if?

My life is so full of the road not taken. What if? The Who, the What, the Why Where When and How would all be different. But the mountains would be the same. And the valleys would still fill with fog on October mornings. The huge Douglass Fir would still have grown through the decades. The tides would flow in and back out.

The grains of sand might have been aranged in a different pattern, once, twice and again.

And the grass on the road might have been tromped on one more time. And really, what would have mattered. What.

If.