Soft socks.
Downtown was having a big sale in our little town. We're not spending much for the Season of Spending and avoided the Friday sales entirely, but the IT and I went downtown after I picked her up from synchronized swimming practice.
A clothes store was having a 20% off sale and was busy. The only things that I liked were way too far from the price range, but the IT and I did look at the socks. I bought a pair of cashmere blend socks last month.
I've danced swing and jitterbug for over 20 years and work can be long hours on my feet. I buy good shoes but my feet often hurt and get tired. That is the joint that is starting to have some arthritis, the metacarpo-phalangeal joint. I automatically block pain when I'm working. I don't listen to it. On the weekend or with time off, I start noticing. I relax and drop my guard. The nerves signals start to come through.
When we went from dictating in the hospital clinics to full time electronic medical records, my shoulders seized up. I could hardly move. The change from dictating and writing for 10 hours a day to hauling around a weird laptop and trying to understand the program put me into a mixture of astonishment, panic and rage. We had eight hours of training and went live in all the clinics. None of us except the geeky computer doctors who'd picked the system understood it and we understood way less than they'd started with, an entire year ago.
The nurses had tiny half size piplapsqueaktops. The keyboards were teeny. Their hands cramped up.
We all filed for Workman's Comp. I went to physical therapy. Max would start working on my shoulders, which were like marble. Rock. Granite. "Does it hurt?" he'd say.
"No," I'd say. I couldn't feel it at all.
He would work for a while. Hot towels. Massage. Exercise. The nerves would wake up.
"Now it hurts," I would say, flinching. The nerves would go from frozen to white hot. Wires coursing from my neck and shoulders up in to my brain. He would wrap me in the ultrasound and towels and leave me. I would go from white hot wired slowly slowly to relaxed. Don't fight it. Just sit there and let the pain roll through like waves. I learned how to hold my neck and my shoulders differently. How to relax even when the computer would not let me take care of my patient, even when I was fighting to get it to let me record a visit, order a lab, find what I needed. I learned.
I bought the cashmere blend socks and wore them. My feet are happy in them. The socks are so soft. My feet feel blessed and loved and cradled.
The IT and I went to another store, a camping store, looked at more socks. We figured out her adult size. We went back to the sale store.
This time I bought another cashemere blend pair of socks. Three pairs of socks for the IT. And one pair of all cashmere, purple, for me, the most expensive socks I've ever bought.
Soft socks. They cradle my feet, downy. Like a mother bird lining her nest with the softest down, for the eggs, for the precious ones, for the babies. My feet are so surprised. "Us?" they say "You are taking care of us?"
I want everyone to have something that makes them feel as cared for as my soft socks.