Fork in the Road"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." - Yogi Berra. Every day we encounter circumstances and with circumstances come the decisions we make to fulfill our lives and make them meaningful. However, once we have made a decision, after passing that "crossroads", we must move forward, accepting what we have done, because what happened has happened and there is nothing we can do to change the past. This is a case in Robert Frost's poem “The Road Not Taken” and Alistair MacLeod's short story “The Gift of the Lost Salt of Blood”. While the character in Frost's poem has consciously come to a dilemma, in contrast, the narrator of MacLeod's story makes a decision without looking into the future. Everyone is a traveler, he chooses the roads to follow on the map of his continuous journey, life. Robert Frost puts his person in front of a divergent path, and he has to make a decision on which one to take. The two roads are almost identical, but one is less traveled. He looks ahead, but does not see far, due to "where he is bent in the undergrowth". Alistair MacLeod does it differently; the narrator has reached a crossroads, but without hesitation he takes the most traveled path. This is the first contrast between the two literatures. "And both that morning lay equally among the leaves that no step had trampled black." the leaves had covered the ground and since they had fallen no one had yet passed on that road. Maybe Frost does this because whenever a person gets to the point where they have to make a choice, it's new to them, it's a place they've never been, and they tend to feel like no one else has ever been there. The character took the road less traveled. The path he chooses makes him the man he is. MacLeod has his narrator take the other path; brings the glass of water to John's mother without thinking about what lies ahead. For Jenny this had great meaning: it represented engagement. Like most young males, he takes the easy route and gets what he wants, or at least he does. He has a son, loses his relationship with Jenny and carries the guilt of not having taken the right path sooner.