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.

An Affair to Remember

When I was twenty years old, I had an affair with Marburg.

In a way, it would be great, truly great, if Marburg were actually a man, but Marburg is the town I studied in when I was in Germany my junior year of college. I had no real affairs that year (or any year, actually), but the footprints I left on that town’s cobblestone streets correspond to the footprints the town left on my entire being.

Marburg was mysterious and foreign, and don’t women stereotypically fall for the “strong silent types”? Marburg was strong: the town remained virtually unmolested through two world wars and a few centuries of architectural revolutions because of its silence. It was love at first sight. I wanted to learn every street, every alley, every staircase and passage that I could tread on my daily rambles.

I wandered regularly. I made a habit of it. The town’s pedestrian-friendly setup encouraged me to head out without a destination in mind, or if I had a destination, to find the most circuitous route there. Wandering slowly through the veins and arteries infusing the medieval town, I truly saw where I was. Discovering a fountain behind a forgotten cemetery was like discovering a freckle on your lover’s toe: a delightful surprise that just added to the elements that made the town unique and lovable.

Too many times, now that I’m back in the States, I realize I don’t truly know where I live. Just beyond my backyard, the road I drive every day to get into town is almost completely unfamiliar. I have never walked it slowly, watching for the wildflowers growing from the roadside gravel, noticing the flowerpots sitting above my neighbor’s kitchen door, or delighting in the way the road dips and curves with the valley floor.

Marburg was a temporary affair, as I knew all along. When the summer semester ended, I returned to Pennsylvania, leaving behind the body and soul of a town I knew almost as well as my own. When I consider my future, I wonder if I’ll ever return as a permanent resident to that town, or whether I should establish it in my heart as a deep and abiding fling that can sadly never be repeated.

I believe that, no matter where it ends up being, I’ll know I’ve found home when I can feel the same intimate connection with a place as I had with Marburg. And that one will be an affair to remember.

One Small Step

On Saturday afternoon, my mom and I took a fine and fancy ramble through the yard, bouncing ideas off one another for extending the prettyish sort of little wilderness behind the garden shed, and observing which creatures of the wild have been meeting up on our property. In ankle-deep snow, we discovered, much to our delight, deer tracks! It looked as though a small family had come through, blending in their trails with those of the rabbits, the juncos, and the wookiee.

That night, I wrapped myself in the red and black checkered jacket that hangs by the back door and walked the driveway, examining the shadows of the trees, which lay on the white snow: silent, bold, black lines cast by the bright silver moon.

I woke up Sunday morning to a brown world. As we adjusted our choir robes before the service, we all asked each other what happened to the snow. Several inches had disappeared overnight. I was glad I had taken the time to go explore the trees' shadows against the white canvas of our yard the night before. It's possible that winter has left us until December.

Of course, it's possible that this is a deceptive thaw. In any case, the slight rise in temperature yesterday encouraged me to spend as much of daylight as I could outside. The ankle-deep snow had become ankle-deep mud, the area around the compost bin soggiest of all.

And then last night, I braved whatever wilderness comes out after sundown, and I took a brief, but beautiful stroll around the back of the garden shed, between the vegetable garden and the grapevine, around the deck, and back to the backdoor.

If the neighbors aren't already talking, they will be now. "Well, her mother says she's living at home while she's in grad school," they're saying to one another, "but have you seen the way she wanders the yard at all hours? I think grad school's their little language for something else."

I don't care. The night was too inviting. The moon lit my way better than any flashlight. The mud squashed gratifyingly into the tread of my boots. The weather is still cool enough to keep most animals in hibernation, but a close call with a skunk last summer kept my senses sharpened nevertheless. The rustle of leaves around the strawberry plants encouraged me to hurry a little faster toward the house. Before I began shivering inside my grandpa's old hunting jacket, I stood on the deck, just me and the moonlight, staring into the sky.

:clear night skies:
:31° F:

Quo Vadis?

On Thursday, the temperature rose about twenty degrees (making it just a hair above freezing), and the setting sun knocked on the living room window and asked me to come out and play. I bundled up, and my cat and I went out to see what we could see.

A few days earlier, we had gotten another coating of ice, and shortly after that, about a half-inch of snow. The wind had died down for a short time, and the end result was a beautiful splatter of animal footprints, all frozen in time like so many fossils.

Among them, as far as I could identify, were juncos and blue jays, whose prints centered on the patio and under birdfeeders; the wookiee (my cat), whose larger-than-average footprints look like a small dog’s patrolling every corner of our yard; rabbits, who remain fully hidden during the day, but evidently scuttle around the yard when no one’s looking; and squirrels.

The squirrels took me a while to identify, because they were in little clusters of four, each cluster spaced anywhere from 6 to 12 inches apart. I suppose they must have hopped. Or maybe they weren’t squirrel prints after all.

In any case, as the wookiee and I wandered around the yard, following footprints and chasing each other across the smooth drifts of snow, I turned around and traced with my eyes just where I had gone that evening.

I saw my footprints to the mailbox and back to the patio, to the garden swing and around the back of the tool shed, a group of bootprints where I had stooped to examine the squirrel prints under the pussywillow, and a line of footprints smashed through the icy layer parallel to the wookiee’s when I chased him back to the house.

The snow makes it clear where we’ve been. What it doesn’t as effectively reveal is where we’re going.

Quo vadis? Wohin gehst du? Where are you going? In whichever language, it’s a valid question. Our footprints, whether traced in snow, in carbon, or even in emotion, will tell a candid story about us when we’re gone. If we choose carefully the direction we’re heading now, our footprints will leave a valuable path for the ones to follow.