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For my birthday my son gave me black orthopedic shoes. He booked the senior shuttle at the fair too, without asking me. Then I bought my own pair. Fourteen days later that seat rode around empty. I walked five hours at the county fair on Halloween night. My phone said seven thousand seven hundred steps. Twenty two turns of rope in the haunted maze line. Zero toe pain. My name is Donna. I am seventy one. I have hammer toes, the kind that curl up and knock against the top of everything. The shoes came in a white box. They were black, wide and flat, with a strap that dug in tight, like it was trying to hold me still. The tag said supportive. The box said this is who you are now. And under the tissue paper, if you can believe it, there was a printed confirmation. County fair shuttle. Senior loading zone. Reserved, D. Marsh, one seat. He had printed it at home and folded it in half, and the crease was worn soft where a thumb had gone over it twice. Somebody sat at a kitchen table and decided which gate I should be dropped at. My name sat there in capital letters, the way it goes on a form you do not fill out yourself. They planned my whole Halloween around a bench. I want to be fair to Mark. He is not the villain here. He is forty three and he calls on Sundays. He loves me. He just keeps buying things that say the wrong thing about me. Last year it was a shower chair. The year before, a grabber tool with a magnet on the end. I still make the pies for the church supper. I am not done. I said thank you, because that is what you do. Then I wore the black shoes for six weeks. A week after my birthday I heard Mark on the phone with his wife. "Mom loved them." I had said thank you. That is all I said. But in this family, thank you means you accept it, forever. My sister Reva called me that same week. Reva is seventy four. She has never once been careful about anything. "Donna, I can hear you standing wrong," she said. "It is the shoe. It is not your feet." She told me what she wears. Cloud Walk. Knit things, soft, nothing hard anywhere. "I have shoes, Reva." "You have a box and a shuttle pass." "They were a gift." "So was the shower chair," she said. She hung up first, the way she always does. I let it go. Write that down, because I am going to pay for it. My friend Bernice made her peace with all of this years ago. She sits with the coats and she holds the purses at the parade. She says it is restful, and maybe it is. But I have watched Bernice watch her grandsons on the midway. "You go on ahead," she tells them. "I've got the jackets." She says it every single time. She watches them go the way you watch something leave without you. Every Saturday I have my grandkids. Lacey is six. Bo is three, and the second you blink he is gone. At the pumpkin patch in October, my toes quit in the wagon line. The black shoes pressed straight down on the curled joints. I had to stand on the outside edges of my feet. Like a girl balancing on a fence rail. Lacey narrated it. "Grandma's doing her funny walk." "I am not." "You are. You do it at church too." Six year olds do not miss anything. The wagon man waited. The line waited. Mark had met us there on his lunch hour. He did the thing that ruined the whole day for me. He used the voice. "It's fine, Mom. Take your time." You know the voice. The one you use on somebody you have already decided is fragile. I invented that voice. I used it on my own mother, thirty years ago, at this same fair, over her shoes, while my kids pulled my sleeve. She was fifty nine. Younger than I am now. Somewhere she is laughing at me, and she has earned it. It was not the only Saturday like that. At the trunk or treat I lasted forty minutes. Then I sat in a folding chair by the church van. I handed out candy while Bo ran the whole lot. Bo came back around for the fourth time and looked at me sideways. "Grandma, are you the sitting one now?" "Go get your candy, buddy." He ran off. I stayed put. Everyone was very kind. Everyone is always very kind. That is how you know everyone has decided you are old now. They all get kind. And loud. And slow. Ray and I used to close that fair down. He has been gone four years. He walked the midway until they cut the lights. He never once looked for a bench. I did not want the shuttle. I wanted the walk we used to take. And that is when it hit me, sitting in that folding chair by the van. This was never really about the shoe. Mark had decided who I was now. Those shoes were the costume he picked out for me. The one who sits by the van. Gets the voice. Gets the slow talking. Gets a seat held for her at the senior gate. Well, that woman does not do the haunted maze. I can tell you that much. Here is what nobody buying me these shoes ever stops to notice. My Saturdays are not sitting Saturdays. I am the one climbing the hay bales behind Bo. I am the one carrying Lacey's treasures, which are rocks. My hands are as full as any young mother's out there. My feet have a great deal more mileage. If anything I need the good gear more. And nobody makes it for us. Not for the fast grandmothers. They make us the black ones and the seat by the van. So I put the black shoes in the closet. I was sore about it for exactly one evening. Then I got practical, because I am practical. That part they got right. I started paying attention at the pumpkin patch. Half the young mothers were in the same kind of shoe. Soft knit, round and roomy at the front. On and off at the wagon without anybody sitting down. Not one of them was standing on the edges of her feet. I called Reva back on a Tuesday. She had the answer out before I finished the question. "Cloud Walk," she said. "I told you in September." Then she said the sentence that closed it. "Half my water class walks in these. The oldest one is eighty one. She walks the whole parking lot to her car." Her class. Her class and the young mothers at the wagon line, in the same shoe. There is no version of black orthopedic that does that. She talked at me on speaker while I did my dishes. Reva has never explained anything in order in her life. "Donna, it's soft up top. It just gives right where my knuckles poke up. You forget your feet are in there, that's the thing." "And if I swell up by four o'clock?" "Then it swells with you. It does not fight you. Where was I." "The top of it." "The front, that's what I meant. Round and roomy. My toes sit how they want to sit. Nothing pushing down on the knuckles." Then she got going about the laces, or the lack of them. "There is no lace business at all. You stand up, you step in, you go. My hands can't be messing with laces anymore anyway, Donna. Neither can yours." "Do they hurt at first?" "No. That's the part nobody believes. You wear them out of the box. There is no week of blisters. You put them on and you walk." Then she said the rest of it. "Get two while you are at it, they are doing a buy one get one free right now. And do not sleep on the Multicolor. My whole class went through them, they are down to almost nothing." I ordered two, that night, alone, at ten o'clock, delighted. I will be straight about one thing. These are not boots. They will not haul you through a January mud lot. I would not put them on a ladder. What they do is a grandmother's Saturday. Pavement, gravel, hay, church tile, midway. Five hours of it, on feet that curl. They came, two boxes. I put a pair on in the kitchen. Then I stood there like a fool. My toes spread out. That is the only way to say it. They went flat and wide and nothing stopped them. I walked the hallway twice. Sixty steps down and sixty steps back. Nothing knocked the top. Nothing pressed the joints. I called Reva from the hallway. "Well?" "My toes are lying flat, Reva." "I know they are," she said. She did not gloat. She has other days for that. Saturday I did the farmers market. Fifty eight minutes. Two thousand eight hundred and twenty steps. Both loops. I never sat on the bench by the honey man. He noticed, because he notices everything. "You skipped my bench today, Donna." "I did not need it." He laughed and gave me an extra jar. Then came the fair on Halloween night. Mark got there first with the shuttle pass in his shirt pocket. I told him to give the seat to somebody who wanted it. "Mom." "Give it away, Mark." Five hours. Seven thousand seven hundred steps. The whole midway twice. The pumpkin contest tent, where Lacey came in fourth and took it hard. Then the haunted maze line. That line is twenty two turns of rope on gravel, with a three year old hanging off your arm. "You want to sit this one out, Mom?" "Twenty two turns, Mark. Count them with me." He counted. He was quiet by nine. Lacey wanted the ferris wheel at the end. We stood in the switchbacks. I turned every one of them without putting a hand on the rail. The boy running the wheel watched me come up the last four turns. He was maybe twenty. "Ma'am. What are those." "Cloud Walk," I told him. "Say it again." "Cloud Walk. Two words." He pulled a pen from behind his ear and wrote it on the back of a ride ticket. Then he told me why he was writing it. "My mom's on her feet all day at the hospital. She limps out to the car." He read the ticket back to me twice. "She gets off at seven. I'm telling her tonight." I got home at eleven fifteen and slept like a stone. The next morning I put my feet on the floor and took ten steps to the window. Ten steps. Nothing curled, nothing raw across the top, no holding the dresser. I made pancakes before anybody in that house was awake. Mark came by Saturday. He saw them by the door and stopped. "Mom. You walked the whole fair." "I did." "You didn't use the shuttle at all." "I know," I said. That was all I said. I could have sung it. He picked one up and looked at the sole. Then at me, then at the closet where the black ones live. "I thought I was helping," he said. "I know that too." The second pair went to Bernice. I set the box on her kitchen table on a Sunday. "Donna, I don't need these." "The coats can hold themselves, Bernice." She opened the box anyway. She wore them to the parade in November. She stood the whole thing, up front, on the curb. "I forgot what the end of a parade looks like," she told me at church. "You can see the horses." The black orthopedics live in the garage now. They are excellent for hosing out the recycling bins. Everybody in this house has finally been assigned the job they deserve. Lacey took a picture of the ferris wheel boy's ticket, because she is six and thinks everything is evidence. Mark saw it on the refrigerator and asked Reva to get the Multicolor for his wife. Reva called me laughing. "Tell your son he is late," she said. "The Multicolor is nearly gone. I am on the list for the next lot like everybody else." So that is where I landed. I am not the sitting one. I am the one climbing the hay bales, and my feet keep up with the rest of me now. If you have ever been handed a pair of shoes meant for a woman you have no plans on being. If you have heard the voice, it's fine Mom, take your time, in a line, in public, while your toes curled inside a shoe you did not pick. If your Saturdays belong to a six year old and a three year old, and both your hands are already spoken for. You need these shoes. Not because they are pretty. Though they are. But because I was two months from turning into the one they seat, and nobody was coming to stop that for me. I had to walk out of it myself. One pair. Fourteen days. Zero toe pain. Reva already sent the link to half her water class, and she says the Multicolor still is not back in. She told me to pass it along to you too, so here it is: https://nimbao.com/cloudwalk Your move.