MARY JO FIRTH GILLETT
My Mother’s Feet after Stanley Plumly How she would lower them, her doll-like feet, into the enamel basin sprinkled with Epsom salts as if lowering her gnarled toes, calloused heels into a rejuvenating mineral spring, a fountain of youth. How she’d dip them delicately, almost lovingly, a jeweler gilding less precious metal. And then, a quiet exhalation. When the hard flesh had softened and the water cooled, she’d bring forth her cardboard emery board and go at it, sanding away the buildup of dead skin as a woodworker might take a plane to an old finish. It was fascinating and horrifying to my young eyes. After she dried off each small foot, wrinkled and withered from the soak, they seemed somehow new, as if her ministrations were a ritual, something other than how one learns to almost embrace the hurts of a hard life, something more than accepting the body’s frailties as fact.
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