Muddy shoes

Everyday, on my way to work—or at least to the bus that takes me to work—I have to walk through a crop field.

I have walked that same path for the last couple of years, and everyone in my neighborhood does the same, going around it would take four or five times as long. The owner gets angry at people when caught in the act, but hasn’t done much else, I guess he accepts it as a fact of life.

It is a beautiful view, getting to see how the field changes year after year.

For some time, the field is empty, and the soil gets dry and rough, a wavy pattern is the only remnant after the harvest, the one thing that makes it different from yet another empty land. That pattern also makes my walking a little off-balance. The distance between each step, trying to land on the highs of each wave, separated by a distance that makes my stride either way too short, or way too long. When I’m feeling adventurous, I try to have fun and run through; I’m always off by a feet or so and I end up walking instead again, scared of injuring myself. I kind of want to nail the pattern down, and then I’ll run through that field everyday going forward, a guy can dream.

In the present, the crops are starting to grow, soon I’ll be walking through corn so tall I’ll be surrounded by it. It is kind of great, if a bit scary at night, since it feels like you can get lost in the middle of it, or more like a little adventure, with the right mindset.

At this point in time, the path has flattened by the constant everyday walk of everyone going through it, making crossing a lot easier. For now, the crops are just leaves that barely reach my knee, but steadily growing as time moves on.

It’s rainy season too, but kind of inconsistent. Yesterday, the sky was clear and the sun shined, the day before, clouds were everywhere and the rain flooded the streets downtown.

And the pathway suddenly transforms into a swamp.

I dread these days a little, I have to take each step carefully, following or avoiding the path taken by others before me. Sometimes puddles will seem unavoidable, but I’m no stranger to taking leaps of faith, and so far I’ve never ended with a stained shirt, if only I could say the same about my pants…

What sucks, is showing up with muddy shoes to the office. I feel ashamed, because the floor—which is carpeted, to make things worse—ends up sprinkled with chunks of dry mud, that I can’t get out of my shoes completely.

I’ve tried a couple solutions. I usually head to the bathroom immediately and clean up as much as possible before going to my desk. It’s still messy though. Other times, when I know it rained during the night, I ask for a ride and avoid the issue entirely.

Another method my mom told me is to cover my shoes with plastic bags. It works! although it’s a bit nerve-wracking because the grip of the soles isn’t as firm, and having a place to store the dirty bags later is a bit annoying. I keep telling myself to carry a third bag just for that, but I keep forgetting.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t care about dirtying my shoes, that I didn’t have to walk through that swamp, that the dirt didn’t pile up under my desk .

But honestly, worrying about what others think does nothing, so I let go. There is work to be done, and blogposts to be written. They don’t walk through that path every day, they don’t get to see the field turn green, the corn grow high, as the season arrives and harvest time comes.

When I was a kid, I remember going to my grandparents’ house in Veracruz, where everything is green and you can pick up mangos from the sidewalks. In a small town with uneven terrain, and dirt roads everywhere.

The house itself was not big, but the terrain around it was, there were chickens and pigs and trees of all kinds, lemons, oranges, and mangos.

I’d always go play in the swing my grandpa tied to the strongest branch of the huge mango tree. I could spend hours and hours swinging by. I would stand in the big trunk—the highest place I could climb thanks to the big roots that served me as stairs—and let myself swing from there, I pushed against the trunk when I swung back, trying to get more momentum, and reach as far as I could. I have no idea how I never crashed with the tree, one of life’s many mysteries.

Those simpler days were accompanied by rain sometimes, very heavy rain.

I loved the feeling of the downpour, the raindrops hitting my head, my back, each of them huge and cold, like a massage through the entire body. I could rarely experience a feeling like that, even less so today. No fear or worry about ruining my clothes or getting a cold, just the wonder of a child excited by the amazing world around him. It felt like walking through a jungle to me.

I remember my parents being okay with it, giving us permission to use the whole patio as our playground. This is something I’m grateful for, they weren’t overprotective about it, and my grandparents encouraged it too. Whatever case, we were kids just having fun, and it’s just water and mud, how bad could it be? I can’t actually recall ever getting sick due to the rain at my dad’s birthplace.

The aftermath of playing on the mud after that rainy afternoon is the memory that inspired me to write about it.

My muddy shoes were a complete mess.

The mud got everywhere, pretty much impossible to get it off at least by a kid my age—it’s not like I had any worries about it either. My feet too, but cleaning that was easy enough. I had to do it outside of course, or else I would make a mess at the bathroom.

I remember that my grandpa got a knife to slice through the hardened mud and weaken it, more than mud, I guess it kind of turned into clay. The soil over here must be quite different.

My grandpa finally freed my shoes from its cage after a while, and used a brush to get rid of the rest. Only for rain to fall down the next day, and for us to want to go play under it again.

This time, they told us we could go play barefoot. Yet another feeling I’ve not experienced in years.