Feet

 There is nothing much uglier than human feet. Animals have rather uniform paws and hoofs that look about the same as their peers. What you see is what you get. Human feet? No. They are all a surprise and I suspect quite unique one from the other. Even from each other if there is a pair of them. If there aren't such people, a foot specialist would be the study in learning about a person by their feet. A Foot Reader. I am someone who does not want to look at your feet. No part of them. Baby's  and the feet of most children are wonderful and sweet and mostly characterless, but when adulthood intervenes feet take on quite a change. I shudder even thinking about it, but they develop a unique appearance. Being a mass of bone and flesh and systems such as nerves and veins, their multitude of joints, carrying huge weights for their sizes, they adjust.  And it's never pretty. Ladies pay more attention to their feet than most men but then again, they need to, if they wear outrageous footwear to accommodate vanity. A foot model, for example, would never subject its feet to the punishment of what most of us do. They likely don specially made shoes that support and pamper and relax all those tiny  joints so that lumps and bumps and twists and turns do not occur. Who wants to look at a foot like that? Some folk spend huge amounts of money over a lifetime of foot care, doing pedicures and hiring podiatrists, buying special little bits of cotton to alleviate the abuses they have put their feet through in their lifetimes. My Mother In Law for example, thought that the narrower your feet were, the more overall beautiful you were. She didn't take into account, length. Her feet were up there in numbers. She crammed her feet into shoes far too short and narrow and her feet showed it, not to mention her hours of wasted time and effort to ease the things, with little bottles of goo and powders and bits of elastic stick-ons.  I discovered this only after she left us to fly amongst the clouds. Unfortunately, my own peasant feet couldn't inherit her shoe collection, but it did give me a reason to understand her sometimes unpleasant personality. Once at a party as we women sat in our circle apart from the male circle busy discussing some game, one lady pointed out the feet of a female person not far away. "They're a size twelve!" she whispered. We all, sized six to eight and a half, gasped. The woman had appeared fashionable and being tall, admirable. But we decided that her feet fit her. Feet know. A size twelve is formidable even for men, apparently. Another woman I know organizes her shoes like a library. She has closets of shoes, all labelled and dated and the boxes of them have photographs on what's inside. What mystifies me is how long it takes her to decide which pair to wear?  My husband had three sets of shoes. One for the gardening and work, slippers made of sheep skin and one more very nice pair for everything else in his life. The latter were shod like a horse, regularly,  when he found an actual shoemaker who knew how to do it. Stars line up their shoes under lights as though they are jewelry. They cost as much. Yes, shoes? Fine. Feet? No, they are not what I want to look at. Ever. And don't expect me to remove my shoes when I visit. What is worse than being in a room full of sock or bare feet? Ugh.