My Gramp's Boots

I threw out my grandfather's boots today. They have been my winter boots for years since his death. They were winter boots, made to see snow and ice ... and they saw snow and ice in rural Maine for the last decade or more of his near 100-year life. They were rubber bottoms, leather tops, felt liner, rawhide laces.

For my Gramp, John Moore Longley (1898-1996), your boots were a part of you. Gramp never owned a car and walked about a mile to work each way. If he wasn't walking, he was riding his bike to Getchell Brook for some fishing. But these boots were Gramp's "snow" boots. The type of boot you wore from November until April whether walking to the store, fetching eggs out back, ice fishing, rabbit hunting, or digging out from the latest blast of snow.

I know these boots have seen weather, work, and fun. I can picture him as an older man bending over and lacing them up as he did how many thousands of times? But I can picture him as a young man, doing it the same way, just faster with a rush about like something is to be done and done now.

I treated the leather each year in the late spring like I had seen my Gramp do it, gingerly working the oil into the leather with his hand and rag, almost thanking the boots for another season well done.

So with cuts and holes in the rubber bottoms, wet socks again, and a new pair in the closet, I tell myself that this particular pair is only a pair of boots. Yet, like many memories of times gone by, both real and fictional, I want this item to be more than it is, to be around like a stone wall. I throw them out as I construct the image of my grandfather telling me that of course I should throw them out, "you gotta new pair in th' pantry."