Suzy Says

Love/hate for Friday, December 20, 2002
Bare feet

Not only is this a very unseasonable love/hate (unless you live in, say, Tahiti or Australia), it’s the last one for the year. We’re going to take the last two festive weeks of the year off, to be festive. Or slothful. But rest assured: we’ll be back in the new year, maybe better than ever, or maybe exactly the same.

But I digress (as usual).

Despite the undeniable fact, given that I have 30 pairs of shoes, that I love shoes, I also love having bare feet. One of the first things I do when I get home is to take off my shoes, which is generally followed by removing all the finery and other appearance-enhancing efforts I had so painstakingly applied that morning, which just goes to show that I really do it for the good of mankind and not for myself. Granted, having bare feet in our apartment does have the delightful contrast of walking on smooth wood floors and soft area rugs, but it also carries with it the hazard of walking into a hair ball, a thoughtful gift of one of our cats, or tiny little rocks of cat litter, deposited by Jack courtesy of her famous litterpaws^?. But this doesn’t deter me from shedding the footwear.

There are few feelings nicer than walking barefoot on the beach, and I’ll take every opportunity I get. When I was in Devon in September, my friend Colin took me to the lovely beach near the little town of Beer. I wasted no time in taking off my shoes and wading in the water. It was warm enough to swim, if only I had imagined that England in mid-September would allow for such things and had brought a bathing suit, or anything that could be made to resemble one. But instead, I had brought sweaters and had to content myself with walking on the pebbly sands in the cold Atlantic water, reminding me of childhood summers in Maine (where I did have a bathing suit and wasn’t afraid to use it).

When I am at my brother’s and sister’s in the country, I love to walk on the grass of my brother’s croquet lawn or the soft soil of my sister’s garden, cushioned with fallen redwood needles. For those unfamiliar with pygmy forests, the soil is unforgiving and gardeners either have to import huge quantities of expensive topsoil or container plant, as my sister does.

When visiting my stepmother in London – including this past September, when the weather was more summer-like than it had been in the actual summer – I often walked around her garden in bare feet, despite her disapproval (when she was a girl, bare feet signified poverty). It’s such a pleasure to feel the blades of grass, dewy or dry, and be closer to the earth and more connected to it than I am in my every day urban life.

At home, I often have my morning coffee on the roof of my apartment building on the weekends. I love to sit there with my bare feet on the sun-warmed wood of the roof deck, watching the sails dotting the Bay and the traffic going sedately across the Golden Gate Bridge. Often, the wild parrots will fly overhead, calling with their distinctive voices and clatter of wings, and hummingbirds will zoom past quicker than any man-made time can measure. It’s a wonderful way to start the day.