Boots

When I made this blog, in my mind the URL I chose for it would be this thing that people would just really wonder about and ask me, "Hey Mary, what's with the 'lighter boots?'" And I would be all cool like, "Oh you know, just... lighter boots," and I would turn my head with a preoccupied squint into the sky. Well, that's not really how that went. I guess URL's aren't as a big a deal as I thought they were. But, in any case, I wanted to write a blog about what it means once I neared the end of the semester. This is that blog.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer is one of my very favorite books. It's a positively beautiful book about a boy named Oskar who has his own little ways of saying things, and one of his most-used catch phrases has to do with what kind of "boots" he is wearing. If something makes him sad, he will say that it gives him heavy boots. But if something happens that makes him feel happy, then that something made his boots lighter.

I'm all for the optimism, and no one wants to spend four-and-a-half months walking around Scotland wearing heavy boots because that's exhausting. Hence: lighter boots.

So here I am, writing the blog that was supposed to be the grand unveiling of its title. It's much less dramatic than I anticipated.

I mean, first of all, not even my own words. Haha, I can't even take credit for originality. (Probably should have seen that one coming when I chose someone else's words for the title, eh?) Second of all, I had imagined that I would be writing it at a time when my boots would be lighter than ever, getting ready to go home to see my friends and my family and my dogs and my cats and everything I knew and loved before take off on January 28th.

But today my boots are heavy. Because as long as I am here I'm not going to want to leave. I'm anticipating the early departure of my best friend, saying goodbye to Scotland and the life I've made here, and wondering how long it'll be before I come back.

Yeah. Heavy boots.