I've got a blister on my heel...

...not a big one, just the small kind that appear from an irritation that can only be caused by a pair of new shoes. Fresh and crisp, the color of the water off the Caribbean, a harbinger of spring, these new shoes have worn the skin of my right heel shiny, like the rubber heal of my disproportioned childhood Barbies. These shoes have yet to form to my feet, their mold still holds form to whatever cast they were created from, the standard artificial foot of a UK size four. They are new. They aren't mine yet.

This morning I sat in a park, a rather nice one near my University. It's called Highbury & Islington, and sits between roads lined with rows of Siamese houses, attached at the ribs and shoulders to each other. The temperature boasted proudly to be in the low 70's and everyone in the city of London crawled from the cool, dimly lit recesses of their homes or offices and out into the light. The cloudless, un-caged sun. I took my shoes off, used my purse for a pillow, and watched as a spider crawled from toe to toe, disappearing for a second to resurface on my next appendage. Next to me a couple barbequed. A dog pissed on some Daffodils near the pavement. A group of 20 somethings chain smoked under a tree. Who could say this moment wasn't perfect?

ignore the world's whitest legs and notice the shoes.

I'm at work now, down in a windowless basement. Black shirt, black skirt, black tights. The weather is inconsequential down here. But today, when I changed, I noticed the insides of my new blue shoes were smudged brown, the dirt from my bare feet staining the polka dot interior. Slight indentations marked where my soiled toes had been; the shoes began to form to me. My feet are still dirty, hidden beneath my tights, harboring particles of the spring. I'll spend the remaining hours of daylight down in this steralized basement and will get home well past sunset, when the temperatures dip down into the 40's again. But my feet will remember what the morning held and the ways that the sun brought freckles to my skin, how the ground left dirt on the underside of my toes. I'll go to bed with dirty feet. And I'll dirty them again tomorrow, in a different park under the same spring sun.