Lucy's Voice
You have chosen your ascent.
Hi. My name is Lucy Hitchens. Darl and I got married the year after we graduated high school. We live on his parent's dairy, and Darl and his father work the farm together. My in-law's are sweet people, and even though our house is next door to theirs, they let us be for the most part. When Mama passed away, Darl's mother took me under her wing and made my grief more bearable. We named our baby daughter Dora after her.
I do remember the Purple Knight, dripping purple rainwater in our kitchen. I'll even admit to dreaming about him from time to time. Cambridge City has ever been a quiet town, and he seemed so exciting. So foreign. Like a man from another world. I wanted that with all the longing of a foolish heart.
But Daddy stayed up all night, drinking coffee and polishing his rifle.
I wonder who I might have become if I had taken the Purple Knight into my arms? In my dreams, he and I . . . I cannot tell you that. Dreams should be kept in a secret place, safe from everyone, safe even from ourselves.
All I know is, if I had given myself to him, I would not be who I am. And I am content, happy in my bones, so happy that I would live this same life a thousand times over if I could.
The Cards Are Laid Before You
Lucy chose the rooted life—the dairy farm, Darl, baby Dora, the quiet rhythms of Cambridge City. She turned away from the Purple Knight and everything he carried with him: the promise of significance, the lure of a life beyond the familiar horizon. She chose family and place over quest and restlessness.
But was it the right choice? Lucy herself cannot say for certain. She is "happy in my bones," yet she still dreams of the Knight. Contentment and longing live side by side in her, as they do in all of us. The consequences of her choice are not yet fully written.
Now the choice passes to you. You must decide the shape of Lucy's outcome—not from certainty, but from the same ambiguous ground on which all human choices are made. You will choose for another person, with incomplete knowledge and mixed motives, just as we all do, every day.
