The start of something, maybe

I’m not sure what to do with the following. Any suggestions? I’m not sure if I should remake it as a short story, flesh it out further, or merely tidy it up a bit. The chronology is a bit off. Or does it have the weight of a synopsis for a novel? Comments welcomed.
She came from a time and place that was fearful of flavor, favoring the bland over the spicy because flavors would bring undue excitement and chaos into the confines of her well ordered and regular life. Her hair was set just so, as it had always been, or at least as long as always had been for her. Her clothes were of a style she had grown accustomed to when she was young and confident and she had not yet seen a reason to change from what she considered a classic mode of dress even though her coworkers saw her as dowdy and priggish.
It hadn’t always been this way. Once, she would have relished the opportunities to sample, to taste, to try new flavors. Once, in years past, she would have jumped at the chance to not only try exotic foods, but to rush off on a plane to the roots of origin of those flavors. Once, she would have flown off on a whim to what had been called the Dutch Spice Islands, suitcase already packed and waiting in the hall closet by the front door. Once she would have gone if she had been asked. If only she had been asked, if someone would have ventured into her life to disrupt the flow that it was headed down, if only someone would have set up an eddy in her stream. But no one did and in time she took the suitcase from the closet, unpacked it, and let her passport expire. Then she enrolled in Jones Business College and learned her trade, a trade befitting a young woman of her time.
She graduated near the top of her class but she didn’t accompany the top students to careers (and husbands) in Chicago. They were younger than she had been, going straight from high school to the college and she had allowed a few years to elapse. And so, with her parents’ approval, she settled for a position near at hand- the Des Moines Insurance Company. She entered the workforce there, and there she stayed. Over time she became the anchor around which her department revolved. She knew what was what, and what had been, but never did she figure out what might be.
Her penmanship had always been a point of pride for she had worked hard and long at it in the waning days of the Palmer method. She labored to match the loops and curls with utmost precision, fighting against her natural inclinations to find her own way through the letters and words. She recalled those long days of practice, of making each loop just so, and each slanting letter just so, seeing in their perfection a doorway to freedom, seeing in each uniformly shaped letter a way to grab her suitcase that then had remained in the front hall closet, still waiting for the chance to fly out the door to the taste forbidden spices she had only heard of.
What she didn’t now (nor could she know) that each loop, each careful turn of the pen, each perfect and impersonal letter was a trap that would keep her locked in a time which no longer valued such niceties. She did as her superiors instructed her. When the manual typewriter gave way to the electric, she followed suite, thankful for the sake of her arthritic hands. When the computers entered the office bearing word processing, her thanksgiving gave way to disgust. At least with a typewriter she could see the keys strike the paper making a permanent mark on the page. She placed no trust in the computer, despite the constant assurances she was given. When they unpacked and installed the computer at her desk she began to think of the suitcase that once had sat on the closet floor. And of spices never tasted.