a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Friday, March 25, 2022

In my shoes


I promise that this isn't going to be a morality tale about learning the trials of others' lives...it's really literally about shoes and how...well, I'll come to that later.

I've been walking a lot lately, since an arthritis study I'm participating in gave me this basic fitbit to keep track of my "activity" each day.  


It isn't the easiest contraption to wear and keep charged, but, though it insists on showing me data I really don't need to know...like the number of times I get up from a chair each hour...it has been an admittedly helpful way to think about moving my feet.  And since spring has sprung fully around here, the longer days mean I've more chances...and more incentive...to get out and hit the ground more often.



Spring is our most enlivening season.  Each day a new blossom; each day a new urge to walk among them.  The sun changes the shape of shadows, the moon stays in the morning sky a bit longer.  Last week the redbuds burst out; this week the azaleas take their turn.


Bouquets of all sorts burst out from passing yards, and tulips, thanks to friends' gifts, appear at the door.






But I digress...back to those springier walks, and the shoes I step out in.

Lately, my walks have been a little lumpy.  I thought it was just the unevenness of pebbly or cone-littered roads, but the other day I turned my shoes over to find each sole a little thin...my finger could pass right through.  I sighed.

I like these shoes, which my brother-in-law Jim found for me the last time I visited their favorite shoe store with him and Eileen...they were a brand I wouldn't have thought would take the place of the more orthopaedically supported kind I usually go for, but they have kept me comfortable company for the year and a half (or more, now?) that I've had them.

Since time and tides don't permit me a trip west, I took myself to the huge shoe warehouse in the mall here, looking to replace the ones I'd worn to the bone.

I hate shopping.  Thinking about a drive to a store sets me frowning (grocery and art  stores excepted).   There are too many choices, too many unhappily unsuited things before me.  More often than not, I walk out empty-handed, exhausted and confused with the uselessness of it.  My only gain is that, having parked in the spot farthest from the store, and doggedly plowing through the crammed aisles inside, I can rack up eight or nine hundred new steps on my day's tally.  Still, it's not the most charming of vistas to enjoy stepping into.



Necessity, however, dictated.  At least, I thought, I know what I am looking for, so I  deliberately wore my holey shoes to be sure I found the right thing.

But alas...like most things you favor, this style no longer existed.  Newer designs, with gel cutouts and laces that tangled when you looked at them, had edged my good practical ones out.  Sizes, too, seemed off...I measured my old shoes to the new ones which claimed to be 7.5s and found them off by a quarter-inch.  To cut a long (frustrating) shop short, I chose a pair of purple laced sneakers I thought would work, leaving behind under my try-on bench eight boxes of pairs that didn't.

Once home, however, walking around the rug, I noticed that these new ones ("Shoes Made for Women", they cackled on the box top) didn't give me much top support.  I sighed again.  Back to the store.  In the rain.



This time, only five boxes aside, I made do with the ones above...a half-size bigger to allow for an insert and heavier socks, should they last through next winter.  This time I walked up and down the aisles in them for at least a quarter hour until I was sure.  In each aisle I passed heels higher than the stand they stood on and women trying them on for spring wardrobes.  It's entertainment, of a sort, I guess.

Last evening with my friend Laurie, I, newly shod and with a springier step, headed out to the arboretum to check out the new blooms.  A pair of gel pads helped take my mind off my feet and onto the Spanish bluebells, cherry blossoms, tiny hyacinths and snowdrops...a fine evening's walk indeed.

At bedtime, I charted my steps with a smile (9,764) and slept happily.

I'm sorry there's no moral to this story...just a spring complaint and a confection of flowers.  Forgive me.







Sunday, March 6, 2022

The double-edge of March

 


March has brought us flowers and pain, new life and old woes across the world. 

 I just put up my monthly sign for PORCH, our local volunteer hunger relief organization (I've written about it before), and sent a note to neighbors to remind them of our bag of food/donation collection next weekend.  


Hunger, like March, is a many-sided brute.  While aesthetics consider it a path to holiness; others a staff of life for themselves and families; and some a dietery  regimen, or the latest diet, there are those for whom, through lack of basic resources or famine or the destruction of war, hunger means more than food...homes destroyed or abandoned, families separated, children unfed in so many ways, the loneliness of an unreachable distance...with miles to go to safety, if there is means and strength and time. 


I am glad to work for PORCH...they are a wonderful, dedicated, and determined grassroots group of volunteer women and men, young and elder.  The relief of hunger, even here in this privileged town, is important; the food-challenged (I'm wary of this euphemism, though it's used a lot) can be invisible but present in multitudes.  Mostly we worry about children and the strapped families who care for them...grandmothers, immigrants, refugees, single parents, teenagers...the  stranger at the gate.


But as I wrote this morning's PORCH reminder, I thought of all those far from reach or help.  It seems an impossible task, that saving of life through its most elemental need...food.  In spring, the season of flowering, the earth bringing forth its beauty, promising abundance in gardens and farms, we yearn for...even expect...hope.   The connotations of March delude us.

Our book group this month read a novel from a newish writer who needs reminding that it's best to write what you know and can feel.  It centered on librarians in Paris who struggle to keep safe their books and themselves from the coming invasion of Hitler's ruinous corps, and while it looked promising, it read quite superficially...I'd call it a romance novel.


The book seemed a surprising choice for a group like ours...indeed, we couldn't figure out who recommended it.  We like history, and certainly we grew up in libraries and books, but we usually ask of writers some sensibility, some insight, into the human spirit.  It is well, if you are out to please a quick reader, to paint a backdrop of historical anecdotes (usually ones that can be gotten from the encyclopaedia), the most poignant to swell the heart and the most horrifying to thrill...and then draw in the foreground a romantic intrigue or two.  

rvm, "Wish you were here"

Our discussion, though, broke through into the subject of betrayal...the betrayal of one people to another, of one person to another, of the horror of both betrayal and reprisal.  Who can you trust if the climate of hunger is thrust upon you?  What would you do, even against the common good (or the family good, if it comes to that) to survive, physically and emotionally?  How do you live with the consequences, life-long?  This last, it seemed to me, presents an intriguing look into the varieties of ways in which denial and doubt tangle the spirit, foiling hope.

If we thought the inconvenience of the Covid pandemic was problematic (betrayal, denial and doubt rife there, too), think of the constancy of war betraying the hunger most of us have for a life of substance beyond survival...a life not pitted against the power hungry, the egoists, the tunnel-visioned Goliaths.

Alice Dodds May, "Invasion"

It's hardly up to March, its namesake the god of war, to find a way through the conundrum of beauty and horror...the season is meant only to illustrate it.  For us, who must take it to task, person and people, where is the inspiration, where the means...where the hope?


Joy after Hope, photo from Susan Stein

Perhaps, to begin, we need to accept hope as it comes, 
one spring-scented breeze at a time.