vignette

When I was seven or eight or ten or nine I consciously decided to go without any footwear as much as possible through one summer. No socks, no shoes, no sandals; bare foot. At the beginning I stuck to walking on grass and paved surfaces and the occasional well groomed path, but as the days turned into weeks the bottoms of my feet became thicker, more durable. So then I took to walking on pavement most of the time. By the end of the summer I could walk on fine to coarse gravel and barely feel it.

Since my mom wasn't working, and since we lived in outer suburbia, there were no day care programs that I was sent to along with some other friends from my street, so all of those summers as a kid I could play with my friends and that summer in particular I did it barefoot.