my boots

happily, the day did not go as expected. What I thought I would have to do, I did not, and although the issue is not wholly resolved, it is solvable in a way that I can live with...easily. I'm so f'ing relieved I could skip down the street, except I'm wearing my cowboy boots, and that would result in damaged ankles. Let me tell you about these boots. I love these boots. Not because they are particularly nice looking, or comfortable, but because they are a piece of me. What piece I'm not sure...hopefully more on that as we toodle down the page.

Back to the boots. In the community where I grew up, we all wore cowboy boots. Didn't matter what you were doing...they were standard issue for whatever the task. I didn't get my first pair of tennis shoes until I was in grade school where we were required to have tennis shoes for PE. Some times we got our new boots at the beginning of the new school year, sometimes we got them for Christmas.

When I got these, I hadn't gotten a new pair in a while...I didn't even have a pair. The previous year I had moved out of state with my mother. And we'd lost the ranch two years prior to that. And with losing the ranch, I lost myself, my direction, my sense that anything would ever be right again.

At the beginning of my senior year I'd moved back in with my father who was able to lease the ranch. I was back home. I got these boots at the beginning of my senior year of high school. I got a piece of my identity back. For the first few months I was back with my father he didn't drink around me; instead we hunted, we fished, we worked the horses. Really, for the first time; I got my dad.

Eventually, because of my own drinking, my dad started drinking around me again. It generally wasn't as bad as it had been before, but sometimes it was worse. We still did some things, but because of his addiction his life was cut short a few years later, and our relationship was rocky when he passed.

These boots have been with me 25 years. They've seen me through roundups, through brandings, and butcherings. They've walked me across the stage for my high school diploma which I thought I wouldn't bother getting. They were there when I buried my father, when I struggled with my own addiction, and when I fought my way through sobriety. They gave me strength, and bravado when I had no one at my back. They were with me through my bachelors degree, through coming out, through moving across the country. They accompanied me on starting a new life; one where I thought I wouldn't need these boots, but I did. They've hidden in the back of the closet, they've been shunned, but they've always been loved. They've been with me through the best of times, and through some of the worst of times. They have always been there.

At some point these boots became a metaphor for the best of my father and me. Our strength, our connection to the land, our work ethic, our heritage, our tenacity and fortitude. They are a metaphor for who I hoped I would grow up to be, not who I thought I would be. Hopefully I can live up to these boots.