Chapter 16
Three nice big robins were jumping around in our front yard this morning.
Our almond trees have beautiful blossoms and maybe if someone will give Mr. Frost another sleeping pill, so he’ll forget all about the usual Easter frost we’ll have real fruit this year.
The lawn has begun to get patches of green grass, and the tulips are peaking up though the ground.
And it’s light longer in the evening. I do believe SPRING sprung! !
The arrival of warm weather was very important when was growing up.
Springtime meant we could throw our SHOES under the bed and go barefoot—and the earlier the better!
The FIRST days we went barefoot were usually when we took off our shoes on the school grounds after the last bell and walked home letting our poor tender feet do the best they could on the gravel roads.
Some kids, I’m sure, went barefoot because they WANTED to.
But we went barefoot because we HAD to! There wasn’t any such thing as summer shoes and winter shoes!
No, siree! There was ONE pair of shoes! And they jailed up our feet on the first day of school.
By the LAST days of the nine-month year we might have to fold our toes up to get our whole foot inside them.
And they might have a second sole on them from the local shoe shop or else have holes on the bottoms. But they were the same ones we’d cried about having to wear that FIRST day.
Perhaps I should’ve felt guilty about tossing such faithful friends under the bed for the spiders to build homes inside. After all they had kept my feet warm and dry! I never did though. My toes were so happy to unwind and feel the softness of newborn grass that I never mourned
those SHOES!
To this day, I still don’t particularly like the buggers. And when spring comes, I always want to FEEL the grass with my feet. Last week I wandered out of the house BAREFOOT—no socks, stockings or SHOES.
For some reason I’d forgotten how TENDER my feet can get.
I must’ve looked like Mamma Cass doing the Charleston as I made my way across the gravel covered driveway!
And instead of nice soft grass to sink my toes down into, I managed to on a holly leaf which caused me to jump around like a drunk frog.
So, spring has sprung! And I wear shoes when I go outside. I wonder if maybe I’m getting OLD!?!!