Leave Off Your Boots

There sat the boots in the middle of the trail; black, and as tidy, though not so shiny, as a show horse's squared front hooves.

The edges of the trail were licked with the sunlit dimples of the overflowed St. Joseph river, and the birds were singing around me. It was enchanting indeed, but not generally a place boots would go unchaperoned.

I half expected to find their walking mates as I rounded the last corner and came directly upon the river. I had a chuckle ready, suspecting a jolly fellow overcome with spring fever like the young fisherman I found in Lemon Creek yesterday, darting around after minnows with two sticks. But there was only more sunshine, and the eager river ascending up the banks, its cool mouth glad to take my sweaty fingers and then return them to me, wet but clean.

Here I was stopping again. It was cool by the water, unlike the heat cloud dancing after me on the pavement. There were baby green sprouts beginning on the bushes near the bank, and behind me the birds were insistent. I turned to go, running again, on the narrow spit of land between the pools of shallow floodland.

And there were the boots again. Perhaps their owner had already acquiesced to the calls of spring and dove in with them still on, like I longed to do, leaving the wet things to dessicate in the April sun with plans to return. Or maybe they left the boots for charity, counting on some thrifty walker to take them in, braving the damp smell. But I like to imagine the sudden leap into the air, the ecstatic howl, the kicking off of the boots into the April breeze, the pattering off barefoot; the happy person so tipsy with spring that the only things remembered in the drunken capers up the trail were the dutchmen's britches growing along the edges of the bank.

I never even found the socks.