BAREFOOTIN'

Yeah I know, spring is stuff finally starting to sprout and turn green, the garden being planted, and the awesome feel of the sun on your face. It's the blue sky, clouds, birds singing, and bees doing what bees do. It's love, warmth, renewal of life, and an awakening.

Know what it always brings to my mind? Every year on Easter day, Mom would let us take off them infernal shoes and socks and go outside BAREFOOT!!!. I can remember feeling like I was freed from a prison and that I could run like the wind without being bound to the gravitational pull of mother earth due to them dang clodhoppers we wore!

Never mind that East Texas Easter might be 40 degrees with a "touch" of frost in the mornings. Never mind that it might be raining like Noah's flood. By whatever "almanac", maternal instinct, tribal custom, or (just knowing her kids?) Mom would let them shoes be shucked come Easter day no matter what the circumstance.

As a side note, my readers (reader???) should know that at present time my old butt feet are so tender I can walk across the floor and near founder if I step on a mote of dust. Not so in my glory years. I could race through a field of East Tx grass burrs and laugh at their impotence. The August sun would bake the oil base road in front of our house til the crude oil would bubble on the surface and I would just casually stroll as if on the Academy Award red (black?) carpet.

With "toes of iron" ole frankie would kick rocks, thump dogs, and generally be invulnerable to all with what came from the "sole".

Taking off those shoes, from the perspective of sudden absolute unconditional freedom and joy, was something that I shall never forget.

Thanks Mom for making the most out of the meager material things you had to offer and making our lives such a daily joy: From your loving and alway admiring son.