“I want to take a picture of our feet,” said best friend A. Her bright red toes were inside of bright orange kid flip-flops. My neon pink ones inside coral pink Old Navy flip-flops. We were walking home from swimming last evening. It was immensely humid yesterday: heavy air, thick with moisture; so much so that we couldn’t air-dry ourselves after the pool. It was our friend C’s pool, but she was at a class, her parents were out of town, and it was too hot not to invite ourselves into her pool. We swam for an hour, letting the cool water absorb into our pores and then make them stick up like chicken skin. So we walked back to her house and looked at our colourfully adorned feet. We didn’t have a camera, but I stored the image away in my own memory.
“Let’s never let our feet grow up,” I said. I had remarked earlier, while we sat on the side of the pool with our feet hanging in the water by the jets, that feet are generally pretty ugly. She agreed. Unlike kid feet, ours now have thick soles having walked so much further than our seven-year-old feet could. Mine were particularly unattractive, as they were covered in mosquito bites from a weekend camping trip. Maybe we can’t prevent our feet from aging, but we can mask it with polish and flip-flops, right? Like a 50-something woman who cakes on the makeup, thick eyeliner with clean lines to mask (or try to mask) her own age.