New Boots

Sometimes a gal needs nothing more than a new pair of boots.

I have a plain pair of black gum boots, pretty ugly and pretty old but functional. They are what I needed to trudge through muddy barnyards and yucky feed lots during my farm days.

My parents each had a pair of serviceable boots. Dad’s looked a lot like mine. I don’t have a photo stored in the cloud, but there is a deposit in my brain’s memory bank of him pulling them on to shovel snow from our hilly driveway after a STL blizzard or to splash through the slush on his soda truck job.

Mental pictures of Mom’s boots are filed in earlier memories, before we moved to the house with the hilly yard. She worked downtown part-time and would get all dressed up, but not in church clothes. On wet and slushy days she slipped a pair of stylish galoshes over her shoes and secured them with button/elastic loops.

My gum boots have served me well since my time on the farm. They slip on in a flash. During spring monsoons they get me around the yard with a minimum of fuss. I’m hardly living in the boonies now, but I never rake leaves without them on to protect me from slithering surprises. One drawback - it’s hard to skedaddle wearing them.

Recently I bought a new pair of rubber boots. They have colorful designs of horses and flowers, they slip on just as easily and they have a buckle closure which gives them some nostalgic pizzazz.

I slipped them on to slide around the yard on a gray, icy day when the world’s cup was running over with turmoil and sadness. Kicking through crackling puddles in new boots shifted my focus to spring. I’m ready!