Another Word for Regret

... meadow of June flowers to the right of Miranda's cabin ...

I told Bonnie Wyora that I am looking for another word for regret since I am not so sad about a loss as I am just wishing that I could have added one thing to my life. “What is that?” “I wish I had spent more time studying about Canada. That doesn’t mean I can’t start now. I just wish I had started earlier. I think I spent too much time studying religion and not enough time looking at my country.”

“Oh?”, she said. “When you have lived in B.C. did you spend time studying about the province.”

“Oh yes, I bought books to study nature – books about the wildlife and the fauna. Sometimes I even ordered books from the British Columbia Provincial Museum like The Figwort Family of British Columbia by T.M.C. Taylor ”.  In the second paragraph of the book it said, "The variability of the flower types is ... great and hard to describe."  I used to wonder how I was going to discover all about the figworts on the land if even the author had trouble.

“Well, how about what you do when you are in Ottawa?”

“I do spend most of my time at the National Gallery when I am there, or over in the Canadian Museum of History.”

"Didn’t you study something about Canada at university?", Bonnie went on.

... close up of Miranda's meadow of flowers ...

“Oh yes, Catherine and I took a course called Women in Canada. That is the course where we sat together and she would hold down my hand so that I wouldn’t signal to the teacher that I would try to answer all of her questions.”

By this time in our conversation I was laughing so hard.

 I do know something about my country. I  think what I  regret is not knowing all of the things about it that I don’t know yet.

Arta