Melissa Stephens Art

This past August, I visited the Anne of Green Gables Heritage Site on Prince Edward Island with my sister, Kathy, my niece, Abbie, and my great-niece, Logan (photos below). Cavendish, PEI, is the home of the book’s author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. We wandered red sand beaches, gazed at picturesque lighthouses, and ate amazing lobster rolls! While on the trip, I re-read passages from Anne of Greene Gables, a favorite book of mine. I found the quote above, which appears near the end of the story, when Anne arrives at an unexpected bend in her Road.

The quote invited me to ponder the Road I’ve traveled through my life, especially its recent twists and turns. As the valedictorian of my high school class, I delivered a speech at graduation based on the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost. I specifically addressed the well-known lines at the end of the poem, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” At that time, I believed the path to becoming a physician was “the one less traveled by.” Perhaps it was? Since our trip to PEI and my re-reading of that Anne of Green Gables quote, however, I’m finding the word that’s shouting to me now in Frost’s poem is “Road.” For the journey to becoming a doctor is, even if less traveled, still a highly scripted, unimaginative, straight and narrow Road. I understand myself now as someone who craves Roads, I thrive in their safety, their guideposts, and their limitations. Fear kept me within that Road’s constraining lines. I trusted its guardrails more than I trusted myself, and so I kept walking the Road like my future depended on it, because I thought it did. At the time, I knew the Road offered little to no possibility for creativity or choice but that suited my black and white, control-aholic personality perfectly. One step after another, ever forward, I traveled that Road in “do not pass go, do not collect $200” fashion, with blinders obscuring my peripheral vision, in pursuit of my goals: college, medical school, residency training, career in medicine. I truly believed everyone was on a Road, perhaps different than mine, but straight and narrow just the same.

 I did have one grand detour, a scenic route you might say, when Art’s job took us to New Zealand where we lived for a year between medical school and residency training but, upon return, I merged back onto the Road, full steam ahead. Mind you, that Road was good, very, very good: challenging work and long hours for sure but it was secure, purposeful, and fulfilling. My only regret is that I wish I would have realized, before age 57, that, all along, I had a choice. I allowed the Road to control me, trusting in it unflinchingly instead of trusting in myself. It wasn’t until we moved and I retired, both around the time our kids all settled into their adult lives far away, that I found myself, at long last, at that bend in the Road Anne ponders in the book. For the first time in my adult life I was without direction, without guardrails, and without blinders.  It was discombobulating and disconcerting, akin to skiing uncontrollably down a mogul run, willy-nilly bumping from possibility to possibility, like tossed-aside flotsam jettisoning down the slope. I was unmoored and adrift, missing my Road. “What now?” was the uncomfortable question I kept asking myself.

After our Prince Edward Island trip, the idea of life as a structured Road surfaced again for me late last fall when, traveling with one of my closest friends, Kristi, she shared that she’d never had a Road. At the time I was driving us through rural Lancaster County and my head snapped so fast and hard to look at her, aghast, that I almost literally ran the car off the road! “What?” I asked, “I thought everybody had a Road?” She explained that, as a psychology major in college, she never had a clearly defined Path, her whole life she’s been winging it! She mentioned being envious of her friends in college who had a Road to follow. Ha! Little did she know all those friends, including me, would one day be envious of her. For what she’s learned in her Road-less life, is tremendous self-awareness and self-assuredness. She lives in the present, instead of continuously worrying where the Road might lead next. Without regard for societal guideposts and expectations, she allows her own curiosity to lead the way and sets her own course, not with fear but with determination. She’s a true inspiration for this “around the bend” newbie!

It’s taken me a few years, but I’m content now to ditch the illusion of control the Road used to provide me and, instead, to trust myself, in this next stage of life, to go off-Road, into a new beginning that’s blissfully undefined and possibility-laden. Like Anne of Green Gables, “I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does.” I’m learning to lean into the bend, the uncertainty, looking past my fear to focus on opportunities rather than losses, future rather than past. Now, when I look around that bend, I can see, finally, in the words of Lucy Maud Montgomery, a “fascination”, a sense of “wonder”, a “new landscape” that, I believe, just like Anne of Green Gables suggests, is “green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows” in the “curves and hills and valleys, farther on.” Perhaps a better speech to my fellow students at our high school graduation would have been based not on Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” but on the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail!”

Photos above from Prince Edward Island, 8/2023

Here’s what “Around the Bend” has looked like in my painting journey. The poppy on the left, circa 2018, is hyper-realist, perfection-seeking me. I can remember the instructor joking that if I had a brush with a single bristle I would use it to add even finer details! The poppy on the right, from 2021, is freer, more abstract me, seeking to capture the essence of one of my favorite flowers rather than its likeness.