Dirty Feet

My feet are dirty and I couldn't be happier.

Yesterday, I returned home from a weekend in Philadelphia, staying with a couple of dear friends in their 7th-floor apartment across from the Art Museum. My feet kept going numb all weekend. Something about walking on pavement, I think.

Today I wore sandals and rolled up my jeans before taking a walk around my remarkably green backyard. The thicket of bushes that Mom and I once christened The Fairy Garden looked hopelessly dead all winter -- so dead that you may have noticed I never mentioned it -- and the mockingbird that camped there all winter had poor camo for hiding in a transparent cluster of empty sticks. Between Friday morning, when I left for Philadelphia, and yesterday, when I got home, the Artist spilled his green paint on the Fairy Garden and even added some blossoming crabapples for good measure.

When I came in, I had to wash my feet.

This afternoon, I wore sandals again to aerate my compost bin and add some grass clippings from last week's first mowing. I encountered the wookiee birdwatching behind the garden shed, but for all his wookiee-like aggression, he's more of a gentle giant. He chases squirrels from bird feeders and leaves the birds alone.

When I came in, I had to wash my feet again.

And then this evening, I went completely shoeless while scrubbing up and hosing down the window screens. Hose water + the backyard = muddy feet. It also = clean screens, which is glorious for the sudden spring weather. I washed my bedroom windows and put in all the screens. I was 1/3 through washing the living room windows when it began to rain.

I should probably have stuck my feet out the window for a natural wash, but I didn't. They're still dirty.

One Sunday morning when I was living in Baltimore, my friends and I were walking from the car in the parking lot to the front door of the church. Between the parking lot and the foyer, however, was an open yard of grass. I kicked off my dress shoes and walked barefoot across the grass. It was maybe ten steps all together, but those ten steps held me through another week of pavement and downtown.

I got claustrophobic in my friends' apartment this past weekend, and it's not a small apartment by any means. But for all its square footage and windows, I felt like I was in a shoebox in the middle of a crate stacked in a storeroom in the bowels of a strip mall.

This past Sunday, while they were driving along a woodsy country road, my grandma looked out the window at the trees and said to my mom, "You know, sometimes I think we get too far away from nature."

And you know? My dirty feet and I think my grandma was absolutely right.