It was on a breezy Saturday morning trip through our barn’s double doors that I happened to notice a pair of my old work boots in the trash barrel we keep there. It is in that place that much of what we have worn out or used up ends, just junk taking a last bow before meeting up with landfill dirt.
I had tossed the boots into a garage trash can at the beginning of the summer, an ungrateful end for something I had worn so often for close to 15 years, through winter snows and early spring heat, in wet weather and through the dust of many an Indian summer day. My wife picked them out of the can and brought them to me as I finished trimming a little patch of grass near the house.
“Sure you want to get rid of these?” she asked me, holding them up and away from herself because there was hardly a clean spot on them.
“Oh, I think so. They’re just so worn out, I don’t think I can wear them to do anything anymore,” I told her. “I hate to do it, but throw them away.”
She took me for my word.
It hadn’t been easy to give up those boots. A man gets attached to things like that grubby pair of shoes, unless they rub blisters on his heels, which another pair of much more expensive boots I own does unless I wear thick winter socks with them. I could have broken those new boots in a good while ago if I had wanted to invest the time in elbow grease, but I continued to slip on my old pair, instead — it was easier.
I have known artists who hang on to paint brushes that they’ll never use again, housewife cooks who just can’t throw away cracked bowls or dented pans that served them too well to discard, and gardeners who keep bent shovels, worn hoes and toothless rakes because they can’t say goodbye. It may not be very logical for us to do these things, but it is human, and I am about as human as they come, particularly when it came to those boots.
Before the day I told my wife to move them to the barn trash, I must have taken the boots out of that garage can a half-dozen times, only to realize that I was never going to get them re-soled or that I had no intention of putting new laces through their shabby eyelets again. They were shot, so I finally decided that I might as well start wearing a pair of hiking shoes that still had plenty of life left in them for yard work and spreading gravel and painting window trim.
But actually seeing the boots in the barn that day as they sat on a pile of discarded garden hose and empty paint cans and the usual grime and lint and crud from a brisk sweeping of my tool shop, made me think about the jobs I’ve done in them, the miles I’ve walked in them, the blood and sweat that’s dripped down my hands and arms onto their cracked and faded toes.
That particular pair of boots had its start on my feet after I needed a pair to wear with blue jeans and T-shirts and on occasions that called for something casual and clean. But one day, in need of a pair of anything to head out to the barn, I grabbed them since they were closest to the door. From that day on, I started wearing them for work, eventually to dig ditches for new drains for my house, to paint my barn, to build my deck, to clean fencerows and bale hay, to cut the woods back from the yard, and to tackle countless other chores.
Those boots nearly became a part of my feet; I walked my walks in them, kicked footballs in the front yard with my son in them, wore them to the feed store, and laced them up for camping trips and tours of our crawlspaces. I have used and abused them.
Another pair of boots memorable in my life was my father’s.
My dad finished acres of concrete, pulled miles of wire through houses, and ran a river’s worth of plumbing in his lifetime, and his boots always looked worn and tired, perhaps as worn and tired as he was. I remember a time when he had trouble finding work, and he came home to tell my mom that he could make good money working on a job in Oregon for part of the summer. Since we had but one car to drive, he told her he would take a bus one way, but would have to hitchhike the other, something I couldn’t appreciate until I learned how to read a map.
The night my dad walked through our back door, thousands of miles and a few months behind him, he sat down in our living room and was soon asleep, his feet propped up on a re-upholstered foot stool that was much older than I was. I remember that I could see his socks through the quarter-sized holes in the soles of his boots, and it was then, I think, that I came to realize just how much my dad loved us for he had walked that far and that long to come home.
You know, we marvel at the extraordinary when we see it. We are awed and confounded by, arrogant and confident in new technologies that shape and change our lives. I sit before my television and the satellite feed it receives; I use my cell phone, cook in a microwave, send e-mails over great distances, and listen to crystal-clear voices from 4-inch-wide disks of plastic. We fly through the air and beat diseases and manufacture all sorts of things that make our lives easier without ever really knowing how they work, or even caring to know.
But every so often, I think we should take wonder in everyday things, in the ordinary, in the commonplace and the undistinguished, like a pair of boots that has walked good distances with us.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Mike’s second book, “Sidelines: The Best of the Basketball Stories…” is due to be published in the fall. You can visit his Web site at mikelunsford.com.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: A pair of boots worn well…
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
Nordic Festival Puts North Korea in Spotlight
Greece Passes New Austerity Deal Amid Rioting
'Rumor Has It' Adele's Rolling in the Grammys
Coroner: Houston Autopsy Results Weeks Away
Raw Video: Whitney Houston's Last Performance
Grohl, Grammy Nominees Cut Up on the Red Carpet
Raw Video: Greek Rioting Ahead of Austerity Vote
Raw Video: Child Rescued After Kosovo Avalanche
Reaction to Houston's Death at Clive Davis Party
Pop Music Superstar Whitney Houston Dies at 48
Fuel Removal Under Way on Capsized Italian Ship
Severe Cold Wreaks Havoc in China
Whitney Houston's Church Mourns Her Passing
79 Turtles Seized at Shanghai Airport
Police: Houston Found Dead in Her Hotel Room
Fans 'Speechless' Over Houston's Death
Today in History for Tuesday, February 12th
And the Winner for Best Super Bowl Ad Is...
Stocks Fall Sharply As Greek Deal Is Held Up
Arab League Wants U.N. Help in Syria
Sandusky Can See Grandkids, Have Local Jury
'Bachelor' Free Falls into the Ocean
Apple of their eye at $500 a share
Adele's revealing "60 Minutes" interview
Rosenthal: A's sign Cespedes
Bobby Brown on Houston's Death
Turkey's first face transplant
Exclusive Video: Bobbi Kristina Leaving Hospital
Obama Unveils $3.8 Trillion Budget
Kelly Ripa's Fashion Faux Pas
Lusetich: AT&T Recap
Raw Video: Aurora Borealis As Seen From Space
Grammys 2012: Highlights
2.12: Pebble Beach Pro-Am -- Phil Mickelson
2012 Grammys: Rihanna
2012 Grammys: Taylor Swift
Exclusive Video - Whitney's Bodybag
FUEL TV: Punk Payback Gym tips
