The Best and Saddest Pair of Thrift Store Rain Boots Ever

My daughter and I went for a walk recently in some wetlands near our home. Spring had sprung but some bright red rosehips were still clinging to their twiggy stems. I stopped in my tracks and pointed them out to her. She gushed enthusiastically for my sake and moved on. I thought of the last time I had admired them and wished I had worn my rain boots.

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The cancer is in my bones now. My doctor wants me to walk more. Typical K. Acknowledge the bad but focus on what can be done here and now. So we made a date for a walk in the wetlands on a chill, wet, gray December day. Overlaying my worry for my friend was pleasure in the opportunity to wear my new rain boots.

A $15 find at Goodwill, they looked practically new. I liked to think that the original owner loved the bright colors and swirling abstract patterns as much as I did, but she just couldn’t bear the weight of the comments, stares, and fashion judgements, and reluctantly parted with them. I would wear them proudly and bravely for both of us.

So as K and I walked through the wetlands – she, carefully and slowly, and myself slowly dragging through puddles to test the boots – she pointed out the profusion of red berries adding just about the only color to the wintry landscape.

Did you know those are rosehips?

You mean that’s what makes the tea I buy?

Yes, exactly.

Why aren’t we harvesting them, then? I could save a fortune!

Next time. We’ll bring baskets.

Only, there wasn’t a next time. I mean, there was actually quite a bit of time after that, but as the months and years passed we found other places, other walks, other things to do. We never went back to the wetlands, or the rosehips, and I didn’t wear my boots again until the next summer.

We’re planning a trip to the ocean. Please come! My friend R messaged me on Facebook.

Okay! I wrote back. I already knew about the trip and had made my plans. A group of us were going to stay at K’s ocean house – the house her grandparents built a hundred years earlier. R had fought and beat cancer for years and was fighting it yet again, and no one wanted to say it, but things weren’t looking very good. Cancer Alley was winning again.

Yes, there’s an actual place called Cancer Alley in Louisiana, 85 miles of disease birthed by chemical plants and refineries, but I always think of the bucolic island I grew up on in the middle of Puget Sound. For decades it lived in the shadow of a copper smelter that spewed arsenic and other pollutants in a large, long swath over the island before being closed down and demolished. For decades now it seems to be claiming a large swathe of my generation for cancer. R and K were the latest in a long line of past and future victims.

It was a lovely, long, early summer weekend full of blooming flowers, nightly bonfires, beautiful bonding with beautiful people, and good food. We walked on the beach and I splashed through the waves in my boots, wearing them for the second time. R played the banjo accompanied by her boyfriend C. We asked when an album was coming out. We were serious. They were serious and seriously talented musicians well known on the bluegrass circuit. Soon, they hoped.

Less than two months later we gathered with her family and large tribe of friends to say goodbye. K and I approached the hospital bed in a corner of the living room in her mother’s house. I’d been in and out of that house for more than 40 years and it was as sunny and peaceful as a hug. But we couldn’t hug R because she was in so much pain and she didn’t have the energy to open her eyes. She was slipping away, but she was still there and aware.

We said hello and K went straight into their shared cancer experiences. For many months those two shared things with each other that they couldn’t share with us, their cancer-free friends. I think it’s like soldiers who share war.

Guess what I tried? A coffee enema!

And she liked it! I quipped. It was the truth. She did. K tried absolutely every treatment available, from standard to weird and woo-woo. R’s lips twitched and a very brief, very amused grunt emerged. It was her kind of humor. It felt like one of the greatest achievements of my life and it was accompanied by a suffocating lump in my throat and a hot rush of tears. I gently stroked her hand and walked away, leaving the two of them to a bittersweet tête-à-tête. R died two days later.

In February of the next year I drove up into the mountains to visit K at her river house. The Skykomish River sometimes meandered and sometimes raged past her backyard, and always left treasures behind. I call rocks and driftwood treasures, and K shared my belief. We slowly walked the rocky shores of the river, picking up sticks and rocks, watching the sun peek in and out of the clouds. We paused often to sit on logs. She tired easily. My worry diminished my joy in wearing my rain boots for the third time, but she loved that I loved my boots. She always told me to never stop thinking outside the box.

In August, she was gone, and a piece of my heart is forever missing. It may be lodged in those loud, colorful rain boots that sit in a corner of my entryway, and maybe I’ll get it back if I ever put them on again. I don’t know if or when that will happen, but I don’t think it matters. K wasn’t with me when I purchased them, though she easily could have been since she, and we, found a lot of joy in haunting thrift stores and barns full of antiques. My memories and emotions seem to be bound up in those rubber boots that I’ve only worn three times. That’s $5 per wearing and that’s dirt cheap in comparison to the priceless memories. I’ll keep them forever.