1. Before my soles got burned by the cigarettes I now step on;
2. Before they got stained with beer and paint;
3. Before I have to switch them by some uncomfortable pair of high heels that will show my status to society;
I walked in child’s shoes, in childish boots. In those leather boots that my mother bought me, stressing the point that they had been very expensive for a whole week, after I got home from school crying because some boy had said that my old boots were for babies.
With Ernie glued on one side and Bernie on the other, with my skinny ankle between the two old pals, I went to sleep with them on that same day my mother bought them. My sheets had the smell of leather lingering on them the next morning.
As my feet, and myself, would grow, pressing the cold leather against my bony feet, the black slowly started to fade to dark blue, then to lighter blue, then to a sad shade of grey.
The sole eventually got tired of running around the playground and got worn out and in days when rain fell and gathered in small pools that would invite me, like they invite every six year old or some more playful grown up to take a jump on them, my socks would get soaked and my feet would be wrinkled and red. If only my mother knew that her daughter was walking around with wet, cold feet, some new pair of shiny, but dull shoes would have replaced them (and of course, I eventually found them on the garbage can, when my feet could no longer fit on them. I graduated the next day.)
Bleach is not expensive, although it ruins the fibbers and make your clothes look like the surface of the moon when you use too much. Maybe that’s the reason why my mother and my grandmother hated those shoes so much. Their inside was orange, bright sunset-like orange when I first wore them, to sleep.
All my white socks felt so comfortable in them that they took that orange colour for themselves, as real oranges leave their smell between your pores when you unpeel them.
By the end of the week, a bucket of white socks would be soaked in a sickening, certainly poisoning for a six year old, mix of bleach and water so that the orange would come out of the white. But it wouldn’t. Instead, the bright orange, that would remind me so much of sunsets on the beach just outside my front door and real, perfumed oranges, would dim, and my small feet would always be covered by white socks with a light shade of orange.
Not real orange, no bright shades like the colour of sunsets and fruit and cheap nail polish, but light, fading orange, as the memories of your childhood tend to turn with time.
