Barefoot in Ojai

Barefoot in Ojai by GEORGIA SCHREINER

My feet are greedy. Grass-fed, pasture-raised, locally grown, my Ojai feet have been grown greedy. Nourished (and made sticky) by Ojai pixies and avocados, they are firm and solid with bulbous toes — or sausage toes, to use the taunting terminology of my brothers’ younger, crueler selves. Tanned holy golden by the Ojai sun and powdered brown with Sespe dust. Burned raw by the dead-summer heat flaming up from downtown sidewalks on afterschool preteen adventures (they wailed asphalt-black tears all night in grievance). Pricked into profusions of profanity (the feet, not me!) by satanic goatheads performing their ritual childhood sacrifice. Puppy-licked by hundreds of verdant tongues whipping in the wind with all the valley’s at-last-arrived spring vitality. Washed dirty by the mini-floods of infrequent rains which gush along the sides of streets and gather in mucky backyard pools of ill-prepared SoCal homes and buildings.

All this to explain why they are so greedy. They are greedy for All this sensation. The sensation of crunchy grass lawns in autumn. Of braving that first smack into icy water, praying for a rock-free fall from the overhead ledge to the water hole’s sandy bottom. Of that irreversible moment of contact between their asphalt-stained, pine-resined, mystery-crudded selves and your just-a-moment-ago pastel carpet. Of the momentary ecstasy of Greek-yogurt-style chicken excrement squirting up between my toes. Of the doctor’s knife probing deep in my held-down novocained foot for month-old glass as it wriggles in tickled fits. Of the sandstone suns bulging about the river bottom, gently toasting their soles in the sage-baked afternoon air.

They are greedy for your admiring eyes, your mildly o -put and perhaps a-little-bothered-because-Georgia-that’s-gross They are eyes, your eyes that envy such invincibly leathery soles as they tromp on gravel indifferently, even your eyes as they squinch just before you coolly and a little weary tell me to put my shoes back on, and perhaps most of all your eyes that wince when I inform you that tonight I will indeed crawl into my sheets with my feet just as they are, caked in coagulated dirt-sweat and fecal residues and perhaps a little blood.

My feet are greedy for life. They are screaming in classic Jim Morrison fashion “We want the world and we want it now!” and reciting Whitman as they too loaf in the summer grass, celebrating themselves. Perhaps, if you paused the sock-suffocation and flip-flop-strap-strangulation of your feet for just a little while, they would start to talk to you too. Perhaps they already do.

But whether they speak up or not, and regardless of what your New-Age guru friend/healer/unevadable-garrulous- neighbor has to tout about the benefits of earthing, you must know that your feet are always children. Sometimes they are toddlers, bug-eyed and looking to know the world by putting it in their mouths. Sometimes they are mischievous middle-schoolers, wreaking havoc in all places of adult authority, all the while rather unsure of themselves. Sometimes they are naughty high schoolers, experimenting with sensuous pleasures and altered states of consciousness, fornicating with the mud and getting baked in hot tubs. However they may be today or tomorrow, they are always children. They are always reaching out for the world around them.

And no matter how much toxic nail polish you’ve smeared on them, no matter how much you’ve pumice-stoned them into frailty, they are always ready to come out and play again.

Summer Ojai Magazine writer, Georgia Schreiner