I like my Shoes

I have unusual affection and a deep attachment to my shoes. Currently, I own 2 pair in good working order. I typically buy one pair a year, and wear them almost everyday throughout spring, summer, fall and the milder spells of winter.

When I purchase a brand new pair, the year old shoes hangout on the shelf in the garage for rough outdoor use. Thus encompasses my shoe buying and rotation schedule. It's not too complex...just the way I like it.

I feel very strongly, obsessively so, about my footwear. I decided to wander around through the valley of thoughts, memories and remembrances in an attempt to discover from whence these feelings arise.

I can easily guess, that one of the reasons I become so attached, is because I wear the same pair for hours, each and everyday. They are like an extension f my foot, an outermost skin. The sheer number of hours, days and months that we spend in intimate contact breeds fondness:)

From the "free association" point-of-view, shoes are freedom....I am running, running, up a gently ascending hill, on a soft bed of white, crushed limestone. The sun shines. A cool, shaded forest beckons along my left. I appear as I did when I was thirteen. My face...impassive and slightly determined. I have no worries, in this vision, I just want everyone to leave me alone so that I can just run.

If I have no shoes, I cannot walk. I cannot escape. I can go nowhere, unless I have a pair of shoes.

Hmmm, unsettling thoughts arise from ages past and times long forgotten. Ensuing panic of a small child that had outgrown her shoes, to the point that a parent had to cut off the shoe toe part, so that her growing feet had something to wear. I remember what a helpless feeling that was...wondering how I could just be able to go outside, if I had no shoes. I would be trapped. Immense sadness filled me, as I suddenly believed that I might become a prisoner of indoors, my parents house. I was quite terrified at that prospect.

There wasn't any money to spare, so I was always very grateful when we went to Meijers on new shoe day. To this day, I do not take shoes for granted. In a backward, aspiesense, they are a link to the outside, the out of doors and outside the confines of my head.

I really like my shoes.