My mother is still taking care of me, although I am fifty and she is 74. These boots are proof. This January, the rubber disintegrated, fully and irrevocably, on my 15-year-old Columbia ultra-warm ultra-comfortable snow boots. It was the winter of 2014, the Snowpacolypse, the coldest, snowiest, nastiest, no-boots-left-on-the-shelf worst winter of all time.
"Take these," my mom said. "I haven't worn them in three years. Really. " So I did. Sadly, they were extremely uncomfortable, binding across the tops of my very high arches. But the intention was there.
Right beside my mother's old snow boots out in the garage were these old knee pads, which came with the Bell helmet we got for Emma Jane's little head and knees 13 years ago, when we were teaching her to ride a bike and just getting into the swing of what it feels like to be fully responsible for the mental and physical health and well-being of another human being (or two). One that you love absolutely.
Fully responsible.
So here we are, up north at my parents' UP getaway while that other human being is staying all by herself for the very first time, with no one but a couple of chickens for company. As my brother says, "College is coming, you know? She can manage."
Will I still feel fully responsible thirty plus years from now, when she is fifty? Perhaps. Can she manage? I believe so. Otherwise, I wouldn't have left her.
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