The wind has been a force to reckon with. Tree limbs broken and plants damaged, but still it blows. It beat down so hard this shed rattled throughout the night, and the daytime has been no better. Even with all the help in the world we couldn't work on that single wide and barn today, the wind is simply too dangerous. So early his morning I started fretting, my stomach tying in knots trying to figure out a way to come up with the money to have what most people have .... a home.
I started to become so deeply depressed I went to Ruidoso to cash a check for my boss and pick up some more cucumber plants.
Coming from Ruidoso I spotted a gentleman at the side of the road on Paradise Canyon. I don't know much about this gentleman other than he's considerably older than I am, and he walks everywhere he goes, and his name is Steve.
Several times over the years I have picked him up from outside Lawrence Brothers and taken him home when it was pouring with rain. Today it was in the 70's, nice enough, but windy, yet he stood alongside the road as though he wasn't quite sure which direction he was going. I stopped and asked him if he needed a ride.
He quickly accepted a ride back to Wal-Mart, grabbing onto the safety handle above the door as though my driving was making him a nervous wreck. I promised him that I was a safe driver, and he laughed.
In very quiet sporadic bursts of conversation he said that he once owned a car, but no longer had a driving license. Yet he wished he could get a car, and felt that one day he would have no option.
We pass people every single day but rarely stop to find out what their story is. Walking in these mountains is unheard of because of the extreme difficulties involved. His is not an easy road to hoe. I found myself wishing I had the means to acquire for him a small economy car. It's always so hard to see a genuine need, and not be able to meet it.
I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.~ Robert Frost
