The Road That Painted the Sky

The Road That Painted the Sky

A story about a painter, a choice and a road with no end

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference."

~ Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Part the First: The Two Roads

Everyone in the small river town of Salmara agreed that Mira was a perfectly sensible woman, except for the paint jars. She had seventeen of them; small, fat-bellied glass jars lined along her kitchen windowsill where most people kept salt cellars or photographs of relatives who never wrote back. Her husband, Thomas, who ran a modest grocery on the high street, had long ago stopped trying to understand the jars. He simply walked past them each morning, said "Good, good" to no one in particular, and went to unlock his shop.

Mira painted what she saw: the oak tree outside her window at four in the afternoon, the particular orange of the sky in October, the color of the river on a grey Tuesday when clouds moved too slowly overhead. She was good at it, not in the way that wins prizes, but in the way that makes people stop and look and then not quite want to leave.

But she had never, in all her forty-one years, painted a color she could not name.

That changed on the morning she stood at the fork in the eastern road and made a choice she would spend years pretending she had made on purpose.

***

The eastern road ran out of Salmara past the church and the post office and continued, after the last row of houses, into open country. Three miles out it divided. The left branch, wide, well-paved, signed Aldenmere 9 mi. was the road everyone took, the road to the larger market town where one went for the specialist doctor, the good bookshop, the kind of shoes that lasted. The right branch was narrower, unpaved after the first hundred yards, unsigned. It wound east through fields and hills and, as far as anyone could say with confidence, went somewhere. Nobody had walked it all the way to the end because, as old Mr. Fenwick at the post office put it, "there's nothing down there that needs going to."

On this particular Tuesday, she was going to Aldenmere for new stretching frames, Mira reached the fork, stopped and looked at the right branch for what she estimated was about forty seconds. The light on the right-hand road was, she noticed, quite extraordinary: a warm, un-nameable quality to it as though the air itself had been painted by someone who knew what they were doing.

She took the right road.

She would later tell people she had always intended to explore it. She would say she had been meaning to for years. She would say, with the calm authority of someone describing a decision already vindicated by its consequences, that something about the light that morning had simply called to her.

All of this was true. None of it was why she turned right. She turned right because she had not slept well, because the left road was so thoroughly known, and because she had seventeen paint jars in her bag and no particular urgency about the stretching frames.

That is all. The rest came later, and the rest was everything.

Part the Second: The First Color

She had walked perhaps a mile down the right-hand road when the sky above it changed.

It happened the way important things usually happen, without announcement, between one step and the next. She was thinking about stretching frames, and then she was not thinking about anything at all, because the sky directly above the road had become a color for which she had no word.

It was not gold. Gold was a color she knew well, had mixed many times from yellow ochre and a careful touch of white. This was related to gold the way a river is related to rain, descended from it, perhaps, but completely itself. It had warmth, yes, but also a transparency as though the color were not painted on the sky but coming through it from some source on the other side. Like afternoon light through a lampshade nobody has thought to dust in years.

Mira stopped walking. She set her bag down and took out her largest canvas and her brushes and sat on her bag and looked up for a long while before she began.

A crow landed on a nearby fencepost and watched with the frank skepticism crows bring to everything. A rabbit at the field's edge twitched its nose twice and was still. The road smelled of dry earth and the faint sweetness that rises from fields in the week after rain.

She mixed and unmixed. Yellow, wrong. Yellow with orange, closer, not right. She added a breath of green, which made no rational sense and yet, yes. There it was. The color now lived on her canvas as well as above her head.

She wrote in her small notebook, tucked between the paint jars: A color that exists only when you are walking without urgency and happen to look up. Cannot be seen from inside a house, or from behind a purpose.

She was still sitting there when old Mr. Fenwick came along, he walked this stretch sometimes in the mornings, though never much past the fork. He stopped when he saw her with the expression of a man who has discovered something both unexpected and entirely predictable.

"Painting the sky again," he said. It was not a question.

"It went a color I haven't seen before," said Mira.

He looked up. He was a man who had passed this fork for sixty years, had always taken the left road and stood there now looking at the sky above the right one.

"Hm," he said. And then, more quietly: "Yes." He walked on, but slowly and with his face tilted upward all the way back to the fork.

Part the Third: The Road That Would Not End

At three miles the road should have begun curving back toward Aldenmere or joined the northern lane along the ridge. It did neither. It continued east, unhurried, through fields that opened and closed around it like slow breathing.

At five miles she passed a stone bridge over a stream she had never seen on any map. She painted the color of the sky in the water, a blue-green with no name and walked on. The hills to the north were familiar; she could place herself. But the road made no move toward anything she recognized as a destination.

She sat on a low wall, ate the apple she had brought and thought about this sensibly. She was a sensible woman. The road clearly went somewhere. She walked on. The road went on.

The sky, around mile nine, went green.

Not the green of leaves or the painted sign above a pharmacy. This was green the way hope is green, not the fact of spring but the knowledge that spring is coming, lodged like a seed in cold February ground. The green of something gathering itself quietly before it shows the world what it has become.

Mira sat at the base of a field gate and painted for an hour without stopping. She forgot she was hungry. She forgot she had not found Aldenmere. She forgot everything that was not the color above the road and the way it was arriving on her canvas with a generosity she had not encountered before, as if it were glad, at last, to be caught.

A young man came by on a bicycle, slowed, stopped.

"Where does this road go?" Mira asked him.

He considered this. "I've never ridden it all the way," he said. "I always mean to." He looked at the painting. He was quiet for a moment in the way that people were quiet in front of Mira's paintings. "Does it matter?" he said finally.

"I suppose not," said Mira.

He looked up at the sky the same color as her canvas and a slow smile crossed his face. He turned his bicycle around, headed back the way he'd come, face tilted at the sky.

Mira walked on. The road went on.

***

By afternoon she had accepted, with the particular peace that comes from stopping the argument with reality, that the road would not end. Not because it was long, but because it was genuinely, uncommittedly endless, no destination in mind, none ever intended. She understood this the way you understand a person's nature: not through revelation but through accumulation, until the truth simply sits down beside you and you say: yes, of course.

The road was interested in the walking itself. In what happened to a person who moved without the tight grip of arrival in her chest. It kept giving her colors the way a generous host refills a glass before it empties, not out of obligation, but out of pleasure in the giving.

There was a grey that was not sad at all but had the quality of old pewter, well-used, familiar, comfortable in its own nature. There was a warm amber that arrived around four o'clock and lasted exactly as long as it needed to.

Each color asks something of you, she wrote. The gold asks you to stop hurrying. The green asks you to trust what you cannot yet see. I wonder if the road has always had these colors and I was always too busy going somewhere to notice them. I have walked past this fork a dozen times. I took the other road a dozen times. I thought I was being efficient. I think now I was being afraid.

Part the Fourth: What She Told People Afterwards

She came home at dusk, paint-stained, without the stretching frames, carrying four new canvases and the expression of someone who has been somewhere they had not expected to go.

Thomas was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and the evening paper. He looked at the canvases. He looked at her hands. He said: "The stretching frames?"

"I took the other road," said Mira. "At the fork."

"The one with no sign?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"It doesn't end," she said. "Or, it hasn't ended yet. I walked twelve miles and it was still going." She set the canvases on the table, one by one. "And the sky above it keeps changing colors. New ones. Ones I haven't seen before."

Thomas looked at the paintings for a long while, hands around his mug. He was a man who understood very few things about painting but understood a great deal about Mira and he could see in these four canvases something that had not been in the last four.

"You should go back," he said.

"I am planning to," said Mira.

***

When people asked her, and they did ask, eventually, because small towns ask about everything, why she had taken that particular road on that particular Tuesday, Mira said different things at different times. She said she had always been curious about it. She said the light had called to her. She said it was a feeling she could not quite explain, a kind of instinct, a sense that the right-hand road was the road meant for her.

All of this sounded very fine. She believed some of it. What she never admitted was simpler and smaller: she had turned right because she was tired, and the left road was known. That was all. The meaning came later; abundant, unearned, and entirely real.

This seemed important. She could never quite decide why.

Part the Fifth: Mira's Road Business

So began what the people of Salmara called, with the fond bewilderment that small towns reserve for the private passions of their residents, "Mira's Road Business."

Every week she took the right-hand road. Her paint jars grew to thirty-one. She walked farther each time, twelve miles, fifteen, twenty and the road was always there ahead, always offering another bend, always giving the sky new colors as though it had been saving them up and was glad of the occasion to spend them.

She never found the end. She stopped expecting to. The not-finding became, after a while, not a frustration but a gift, the particular gift of a thing that does not run out.

The townspeople grew used to seeing her set off on Tuesday mornings. Old Mr. Fenwick, who had only ever taken the left road in six decades, one morning turned right for no reason he could explain. He came home with no remarkable story, except that he had looked at the sky for a long time and felt, unexpectedly, very well. After that he turned right about once a month, always with the air of a man who has accidentally done something correct.

The children from the primary school made it a habit to catch Mira at the fork and look at whatever she had painted the week before. A young woman who taught at the local college sat with the full collection one afternoon and said afterward: "I have walked past that fork a hundred times and never once turned right." Mira asked her why. She thought about it. "I knew where the left road went," she said. "The right one could have gone anywhere." She paused. "I think that was the problem."

The sky on the right-hand road is the same sky as the sky on the left-hand road, she wrote one evening. The clouds are the same clouds. The light is the same light. What is different is me, I am walking without knowing what comes next and so I am watching everything. On the left road I was watching for Aldenmere. On this road I am watching the sky. The sky has been doing extraordinary things for years. I was simply not looking.

Part the Sixth: The Atlas and What It Said

The collection, when it was large enough to need a name, became known as the Atlas of the Right-Hand Road. Two large handmade books, bound in dark cloth, each painting accompanied by its small cream-colored card. The titles were her notebook entries, copied out in her careful handwriting. Things like: The Color That Arrives When You Stop Caring How Far You Have Come. Or: The Blue of Having Made Up Your Mind. Or: The Green of Something That Already Knows Spring Is Coming.

One painting had no title card at all. It was the blue of late afternoon, mile four, the color she had never quite been able to name. In the space where the title card should have been, she had left a small blank rectangle of cream paper. When people asked about it, Mira said she hadn't found the right words yet. This was true. What was also true was that she had decided the blank was better than any title she could give it, that some things name themselves by remaining unnamed.

She left it blank.

***

Thomas asked her once, when the atlas was spread across the kitchen table, whether she ever thought about the left road, whether she wondered what she had missed.

"Yes," she said. "Sometimes I wonder what color the sky was over the Aldenmere road in October. Whether I missed something." She turned one of the canvases toward her, the grey that was not sad. "But I think that's the wrong question. The left road would have been perfectly good. There is nothing wrong with it. The difference isn't that the right road was better. The difference is that I didn't know where it went, so I had to pay attention. And the paying attention turned out to be the thing."

Thomas nodded in the way he nodded when he did not entirely follow something but recognized it as true. "Good," he said.

***

The last entry in the second notebook, the one she filled in the third year of walking the right-hand road, was written on a Tuesday evening after she had gone farther than ever before, twenty-six miles, arriving home after dark with mud on her boots and four new canvases and the look of someone who has returned from somewhere that cannot quite be located on a map.

I still have not found the end. I have stopped looking for it. I no longer believe the road has an end in the way that roads usually do, a town, a gate, a wall, a coast. I think it simply continues and that this is not a flaw in the road but its nature. Perhaps the nature of all roads, if we would only stop insisting they take us somewhere. I turned right one morning because I was tired and incurious about the left. I have spent three years being proved wrong about what that means. We tell the story backwards. We say: I knew. We say: something called to me. But the choosing comes first, small and accidental and half-asleep and the meaning comes after, large and earned and entirely our own. The road was not special before I walked it. I made it special by walking it. And it made me, by not ending, into someone I would not have been on the left road, arriving at Aldenmere, knowing all along where I was going.

She closed the notebook, opened a new one, and on the first page wrote the date and the words: Tomorrow: farther.

***

I shall be telling this with a sigh

somewhere ages and ages hence:

I took the one less travelled by,

and that has made all the difference.

~ Robert Frost

The road that has no end is the only road worth walking.

The choice that makes no sense is the only choice worth keeping.

~ From Mira's Second Notebook