Boots on the ground

I come from people with big feet. Not my mom so much, but she was the only girl in four generations on her father’s side, and men tend to have bigger feet. My dad was over six feet and had corresponding size twelves to stand on. My brothers the same; way over six feet. I’m thinking Melvin wore fourteens.

Foot size was not in my consciousness until after I married. My father-in-law was roughly comparable to my dad. Tall. Solid grounding. Definitely a Bohunk, as my mother-in-law proclaimed. Mom on the other hand (I never quit calling my in-laws Mom and Dad) was tiny. Her feet must have been correspondingly small; I’ve lost some of my mental image of her.

Her son had small feet. He was taller than me by a couple inches, and the length of his feet didn’t strike me as unusual, probably because I could conveniently slip into his slippers and be done with them before he got out of bed in the morning. Then I realized my brothers called him Twinkle Toes.

We divorced, he moved his Twinkle Toes to my best friend’s house and that was pretty much the end of it, excepting the genetics he left behind. Each of my daughters inherited his small feet, and the youngest inherited her Grandma’s stature, too. Five foot two, eyes of blue as the old song went.

Ms. Five Foot Two has three small daughters. Rebekah is over 21 and under five feet. Emily is 16, and approaching five foot two. Laura is 13, and we hope not done growing. She needs to catch up to the feet she got from my side of the family.

Emily needed boots two summers ago, when she began working at Heritage Farms; I outfitted her and she trudged through a year at the farm and a winter at the ski run. Now she is working at the nursery across the road. 

Last weekend she brought the condition of her footwear to my attention. I can tell you, I would not like to bounce a bale of peat moss off my big toe, outfitted in those worn out boots. We went shopping for Timberland’s, like the big boys wear.

Except—those tiny feet on my little granddaughter.

Of course, the smallest size in the store was too big. An inventory search of the stores (a modern miracle, those computers these youngsters use) showed the closest pair of size 6.5’s in Cincinnati, Ohio. We asked to have them shipped in, and they arrived today.

Still too big. We should have gone with our first choice, the sixes. They’re on the way now, from Indiana.