Hot Feet

Time was, walkin barefoot was easy.  Little dust between your toes maybe an edge of oyster shell roughin you up some, but the grass was always cool. I especially liked fresh, dewy grass at night, so you didn't have to wait till morning.  Nowadays, some mother is yellin about hookworms and lockjaw from rusty nails.  The roads are blacktop, the heat waves on them causing mirage on down the way.  Blacktop so hot it'll melt the skin right off you feet.  My Grams knows a lady worked up the plantation road when it was just a foot path.  She saw it go from dust to oyster shell, then concrete and blacktop, all in the span of the forty years she worked the Palmetto Plantation.  Bare footed she was, all her life, said it made her closer to God's creation to go round without shoes.  Truth was she probably had none, cept a sandal or two.  We used to follow her to the main house and step inside onto the cold hardwood floors, then dig our toes into the heavy silk oriental rugs Doc Riordan brought back for his wife from the war.  I see her now and again on her porch, feet up on a pillowed milk crate, cussing her feet.  They burn all the time she says, sure that she's not long for the underworld.  That the devil is preparin her feet for the fires of damnation and purgatory.  Old Doc says its just her rheumatism and damage from never having no shoes on her feet.  She says shoes feel like standin all day on the blacktop.  I think we spent alot of time in the wilderness before someone thought of shoes.  The Bible starts out with no shoes being the state of things as God wanted it to be.   I move off her grass and dangle my toes off the curb in a gesture of solidarity.  I step down onto the road and my feet are enveloped in fire, like I stepped into a fire ant nest.  I square my chin and give her a smile, I walk fast cause I'm not long for this road.  There is a jumpin bridge not 40yards away and I am determined to make it, with or without the souls of my feet.  I remember how much my feet burned, remember how cold the water felt, the cloying sweet coolness of the mud and grass on the bank of the Atchafalya.  So much so, that I can still feel it now, heat waves rollin off the blacktop, hot feet the normal state of affairs in a Louisiana summer.