No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service

Dirty feet mean real living, walking the crab laden sands of Clatsop Spit, sinking into the tide lines, washing away the dyed green story of mowing my own lawns. My heels are rougher this year without nightly foot rubs of relationships past. To think I used to get angry when he was chasing me around the house with the Lubriderm bottle rather than wanting to talk! I guess in some way he’d figured out a way in which he could love my feet even if the words and solutions coming from my mouth were of clipped, foreign tongue? Forever fighting for legitimacy in a world of titled rungs.

“So, where do you stand?” I was often enough asked at dinner parties and art openings.

I painted my toes pink for the wedding, wore high wedges under my flowing, flowered dress, walked tall and smiling through the lush lawns of manicured party, making my thinness straight on these feet of mine, the same ones who’ve had trouble in dreams, with shoes that don’t fit on muddy mountain paths in which I shed the sandal’s that have become too small before walking on.

Real work and the shoes we wear, yes work in the societal factories of production require some special shoes, whether sensible, white nurses, steel-toed boots, no-slip bottoms or the tap, tap, tap of gaveled heels in government waxed-floored buildings.

I have owned and worn, leather, rubber, glass and plastics, laced, buckled, zippered, slip-on’s and booted—all sooner or later sole auctions.

I am barefoot now.