Day 43: Feet and how we treat them

My Project: 365 Creative Writing Prompts

Day 43: Feet and how we treat them

It’s a gloomy day in Toronto. Dark, rainy, and while not exactly cold (it’s 17 degrees C – 62.6 degrees F) it’s an altogether miserable day.

On a day, just like today, my folks got a call from friends, suggesting we all go take a walk in the local park. Excellent idea, mom thought, she used to love kicking the leaves as a child. So off we went.

In the park, there were plenty of trees and as such heaps of leaves. Crispy leaves in various shades of orange and brown. We behaved like children, running around, kicking and throwing leaves at each other. When my brother saw a particularly big heap of leaves, he kicked it like David Beckham preparing for a penalty. The next moment, my brother was in agony. The big heap of leaves wasn’t a heap at all but a rock covered with leaves. The result … a broken toe.

A few months later, we were vacationing in Italy and my brother couldn’t wait to go swimming in the sparkling blue Mediterranean. He dashed through the surf and was soon doing the breaststroke, crawl, and backward crawl, slapping and kicking around. One of those kicks got him into trouble. The heel of right foot made contact with a rock and his cavorting in the water came to an abrupt halt. Mom noticed that something was wrong and ran into the water to get him. In her haste, she too kicked a rock. 

They come out of the ocean, limping, the both of them. My brother with a severely bleeding heel, my mother with a severely swollen big toe.

Safe to say, my family didn’t treat their feet very well. And I’m no different.

For the longest time, my family used to tell me to wear shoes or at least slippers around the house, but did I listen … no, I’m either walking barefoot or in my socks. In fact, when I come home, kicking my shoes off is the first thing I do.

I did this, about a year and a half ago. I came home from grocery shopping and took my sneakers off. Then I went into the kitchen to pack away the groceries. Just to be clear, I unpacked and my son gave everything a place.

At one point, he was crouched in front of the fridge and I was handing him fruit, veggies, cooldrink, etc. Everything went fine until I placed a tin of pineapple on the open fridge door. To this day I don’t know exactly what happened but the tin slipped off the door and landed on my foot.

A searing pain exploded from my foot. A pain so intense that if you’d asked me for my name or phone number, I wouldn’t have known. Now if I’d kept my sneakers on this would have been a minor incident, as it was the tin landed on my socked foot and there was considerable damage. See for yourself.

Surprisingly nothing was broken. It took three weeks for the bump to heal, but after that everything was fine. Which goes to show, all this talk about getting older and developing brittle bones … my bones appear to be as strong as steel.

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