JB: Flip flops just don’t cut it in Oregon’s rainy season, which may have really started this week (fingers crossed! I love the rain and am so ready for it).
With today’s showers, it’s back to warm wooly hand knit socks and real shoes.
But the shoes I wanted to wear today — sensible nonskid pink mary janes — still bear the mud from the last time I wore them back in February.
The pink shoes picked up that mud on a Yamhill County excursion that involved roadside photo opps of wintery hazelnut orchards, swampy fields and tall, colorless grasses standing along the sides of country roads. It included lunch in a wine country restaurant and photos of weathered rust and paint.
It also (here comes the mud) involved collecting moss-covered branches leftover from felled trees for a project-in-progress by one of us. To get to said branches involved stepping over and through the soft soil holding tiny streams of rainwater that raced toward a drainage ditch.
But what are friends for? We pulled over to the side of the road, scoped out the situation and gamely waded in to pull soggy, just-right, not-too-thick, not-too-long branches from piles of brush and hoisted them into the trunk. There was much laughing and considering and consulting over each branch, I will add, along with plenty of mud on the pink shoes.
Now some wearers of pink or any other colored shoes would have come right home and cleaned off the mud.
But not me. I figured I’d let it dry and then brush it off. But there were other shoes to wear. And then spring came and then summer and sandals and so the muddy pink shoes stayed, well, muddy.
Until this week, when I pulled them out and photographed them in tribute to a wonderful muddy and laughter-filled day.
Sweet Curious Seasons 