Lives We Could Have Lived

Notes from the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-eight

Tonight I found myself thinking about the many ways a life can unfold.

It began with a woman older than me, standing in the yard of a small Missouri town, showing me where my property line meets hers. She walked slowly down the hill from her place to mine, using a rake the way someone might use a walking stick, tapping it into the earth as she moved.

Spring was beginning to whisper its way back. The ground still carried the debris of winter—twigs, brittle leaves, the remains of storms long past—but she pointed to different corners of the yard and named what would bloom when the weather turned.

“You’ve got tulips here,” she said, brushing aside a patch of leaves with the rake.

She pointed up toward a tree that had not yet awakened.

“That pink dogwood will be beautiful when it comes out.”

Near the entrance to my driveway stood a Rose of Sharon that had been there long before I arrived, waiting quietly for another season to begin.

She remembered all of it. The people who had planted the flowers. The years the yard had seen. The small histories rooted beneath the soil.

We walked through the grass like that for a while, talking easily, the conversation drifting wherever it pleased. Her husband worked somewhere above us on the hill, cutting wood from a tree he had taken down. The sound of the saw drifted through the air between bursts of birdsong that kept pulling my attention upward.

Every so often we leaned against the glass table in my side yard—the one that will eventually sit in the middle of a garden I have not yet planted. We rested there a moment, then wandered off again across the yard.

She told me she had grown up here. Foster care as a child. Married in her twenties. The man working above us was the same one she had chosen all those years ago.

He is dying now, she said matter-of-factly, as if she were describing the weather.

Still, they are preparing the lake cabin together while he has the strength—fixing things, putting it right—so that it will be ready for her later.

She spoke about it without drama. Without sadness exactly. Just the quiet acceptance of someone who has walked a long road and knows that every life eventually asks us to carry certain truths.

At one point she left the rake leaning against my fence as though the earth itself could hold it upright for her.

Then she pointed to a small stone pathway cutting through her yard.

“My son Charlie made that,” she said.

I asked where he lived.

She named a town I did not quite catch. Somewhere a ways from here.

“He’s not doing well,” she added, almost gently. “Drugs got the best of him.”

And then she kept talking about the flowers that would bloom in the spring.

There was no judgment in her voice. No bitterness. Just the matter-of-fact dignity of someone who understands that love does not disappear simply because life becomes complicated.

That was the moment I understood something quietly.

Everyone has a story.

Some are lived in one place long enough to become part of the soil.

Others wander.

Some are still searching.

Earlier that afternoon I had been telling her, before her story took the room, that I had spent the last year moving through the world differently. My children were grown now. Settled in their own lives. No longer needing me in the same way they once had.

So I began wandering a little myself—checking on them, making sure they were well, trying to understand what my own life looked like now that the center of it had shifted.

But when she began to speak, my unfinished sentence no longer mattered.

Her life was answering a question I had not known how to ask.

What does it mean to live one life fully?

And what becomes of all the others—the ones we nearly chose, nearly kept, nearly entered?

Later that evening I thought of a man from my past who could not remember my birthday when I asked him about it. I laughed because I could not remember his either.

But another birthday surfaced immediately in my mind, belonging not to him but to the boy I loved when I was thirteen.

My first love.

Two Virgos. Two days apart. The same year.

Back then we were certain that feeling something deeply meant it must surely last.

He has since passed away.

And still, his birthday remained somewhere in me, intact.

Memory is strange that way.

It does not always keep what was most important.

Sometimes it keeps what was most formative.

And then there is the quieter truth, the one nearest to me now: that I have caught feelings for someone who is not mine to have.

Not because there is no feeling there. That would be simpler.

But because timing, circumstance, and the clarity that comes with maturity have a way of standing at the edge of certain beautiful beginnings and saying—not this one.

I feel it.

And I stop it.

Not out of fear.

But because there comes a point in life where integrity matters more than possibility.

There was a time when I did not know how to do that.

When feeling something strongly was enough reason to follow it wherever it led.

But age has its own kind of wisdom, and sometimes that wisdom looks like restraint.

Sometimes it looks like standing very still in the presence of something that could have been extraordinary and choosing not to step toward it.

That too is a kind of love.

And perhaps that is what I am learning in this season of wandering and listening and noticing the small stories unfolding around me.

That a life is not made only of the things we do.

It is also shaped by the things we do not do.

By the roads we recognize and walk away from.

By the loves we honor without claiming.

By the quiet understanding that the world is full of lives we might have lived if one small moment had turned a different way.

The woman who stayed in this town lived one of those lives.

The boy whose birthday I still remember lived another.

The man whose presence I quietly step away from belongs to yet another.

And I—somewhere between wandering and settling—am living the one that remains.

The only one that ever truly belonged to me.

And tonight, I find myself grateful not only for the life I have lived…

but for the many beautiful ones that passed close enough to remind me who I am.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai