WALKING BAREFOOT

I don’t walk barefoot. Not in the house, and certainly not outside. The bottom of my feet are soft, and they have been that way for as long as I can remember. My wife walks barefoot, and I’ve always thought that was appropriate for anyone living on a farm, in fact it seems that walking barefoot is almost an obligation for someone growing up on a farm. Some of my neighbors did. Our farm was in south Jersey, where the soil is sandy and soft...so much so that The only mud I ever saw was in the bottom of mud puddles as they dried out after a rain, and that did not take very long. So why didn’t I walk barefoot? Because of the goddamn cinders! Hard, sharp, multifaceted weapons that my father would buy to spread in the driveway and the lanes leading from the house to the chicken coops. I wanted to walk barefoot, and tried to do so, more than once, but always met the same fate. I would hop gingerly for 4 or 5 steps, always thinking that this time would be different, but it wasn't, and I would return home in defeat (no pun intended). Why he used those cinders I’ll never know. It wasn’t that we had problems with drainage or wet land. The land where we lived was as flat as my laptop. It never occurred to me to ask him.