My Mother’s Talking Boots

My mother threw out her high-heel cowboy boots some time ago. “They weren’t practical anymore,” she had said. My mother is a lot of things, but practical is the sugar-coated version and nothing was ever too sweet for her just expensive.

My father and she made money working 12-hour shifts at a mozzarella factory just outside of Oakfield, Wisconsin. In fact, that was where they met while in their twenties, so they were never about to waste cash on “things” that had no use. After she had my sister, me, and later my brother on her hip, the boots were gone soon afterward, hidden in the back of their closet—you couldn’t burp a baby standing in heels, at least not for too long.

But before she Goodwilled them, I had my fittings. In an oversize t-shirt and just her boots, I’d stomp around the house just to hear the conversation they made on the floors: soft and muffled across their bedroom carpet like a secret, clickity-clacking laughter on the kitchen linoleum, and hollowed echoes of arguments bounced off the living room’s thick plywood. (They were still saving for carpet.) My small feet inside their real tan leather let the boots have their own voice. That I could only hear if I’d just let them wear me.

When my feet grew too big, fourteen at the time, nine and a half, the talk from the boots stopped as though they had nothing more to say. I couldn’t squeeze in them if I tried.

My mother didn’t just get rid of the cowboy boots because they were “impractical.” My mother didn’t want to be reminded of where the boots had been, what they had seen. When I came downstairs in them she always said, “Gee, I haven’t seen those since . . .” She couldn’t even put a date on it. I think that made her sad, forgetting that is. She had forgotten the youthful voice inside those boots, a different voice that had spoken when she put them on that reminded her where she had been before—before the factory, my father, her children.

But I too remember her, barefoot, smiling as she flipped chocolate chip pancakes in the frying pan while I danced around the house in those boots. Maybe overtime her taste buds changed. She had new sweets in her life—everything that had come after the boots.