What Should I do With These 'Brahn Boots'?
Brahn Boots
Steffanie
On worn-out boots, a strained knee, and a text from my Bishop
There is an old music-hall poem I have loved for a long time from Weston & Lee, called "Brahn Boots". A whole family is scandalized when a cousin turns up to his mother’s funeral in brown boots instead of proper mourning black. Everyone whispers. Everyone is certain they know exactly what kind of man does such a thing, and they give him the cold shoulder all day long — until they learn, too late, that he had given his only good black boots away to a man who had none at all. Everyone was so sure they could read a pair of worn boots. Everyone was wrong.
I have been thinking about boots.
I had a pair I loved once. I wore them a long time. But the heels had worn down so unevenly that, without my ever quite noticing, they had changed the way I walked. And it was the changed walk — the small daily compensating, the leaning I did to keep my balance on an uneven sole — that eventually strained my knee, until some days I could hardly take a step without pain.
Those were careful days. I walked my children to school in the mornings breathing slowly and shallowly, because it was not only my knee that was healing. My ribs were mending too — they had been separated in an assault — and for a long while a deep breath, a wrong turn, a cough would catch sharp enough to stop me where I stood. I walked laps in the swimming pool each weekday - quiet careful lengths, breathing in the only rhythm my body could bear, and I let myself heal a little at a time. I was patient with it. I had learned, by then, to be patient with a great many things.
Because that was the truth of those boots. They did not injure me all at once. They wore me down slowly — in the constant reading of the ground beneath me, the bracing before each step, the trying to move just so, to predict where the next unevenness would come. I walked softly. I walked watchfully. I had grown so used to adjusting myself to the imbalance that I had almost forgotten what it was to simply walk — freely, evenly, without fear of the next painful step.
And of course the boots were never really the trouble. While I stood turning them over in my hands — toss them, mend them, shelve them — I was turning over something far larger and far harder to say: what to do about my marriage. It had worn me the very same way. Not all at once. A little at a time, most of it so quiet and so gradual that I could hardly have pointed to any single thing. There is an old picture of a frog set in a pot of water warmed so slowly that it never thinks to leap, until the water is boiling and it hasn’t the strength left to climb out. That was the part that frightened me most — not any one moment, but how gradual it had all been, how used to it I had grown, how quietly weakened, until I was no longer sure I had the strength left to jump.
And so I found myself standing at a small, ordinary decision that did not feel small or ordinary at all. What does a person do with a pair of boots like that?
Do I toss them out — admit that some things that hurt us simply cannot hold us up any longer, and let them go? Do I repair them — find someone who could re-sole them and set the footing right again? Do I set them on a shelf to collect dust, not quite letting go, not quite mending, just keeping them near? Do I get new ones and start clean? Or do I find a good used pair — because nothing walkable is ever truly new, and the real question was never whether they were perfect, but whether the wear was even, whether they could hold me up, whether I could walk in them without pain?
I did not know. I was writing it all out because writing was the only thing that loosened the knot in my chest. And while I was writing, my phone lit up. A text from my Bishop.
Bishop: How’s everything? Do you need anything?
Me: I’m writing, actually — it’s therapeutic. I’m trying to decide what to do with these old brown boots that hurt my knee.
Bishop: Toss out the shoes and let me help with the soul. Sunday?
Let me help with the soul.
He meant one thing, and he wrote another, and both of them were true at once — the sole a cobbler sets right, and the soul a good shepherd tends. The mending of the boot and the mending of the person, the same word, the same kindness, the same Sunday.
Yes. Sunday. My first meeting.
For the first time in many years, I felt peace settle over me like something warm. I was going to set those boots down. And I was going to let myself be helped. I had protected the abuser, had kept silent, didn't follow through with the police questioning me in the past...I thought only of how it would affect HIM... and so I remained silent...
To be continued…
With love,
There is an old music-hall poem I have loved for a long time from Weston & Lee, called "Brahn Boots". A whole family is scandalized when a cousin turns up to his mother’s funeral in brown boots instead of proper mourning black. Everyone whispers. Everyone is certain they know exactly what kind of man does such a thing, and they give him the cold shoulder all day long — until they learn, too late, that he had given his only good black boots away to a man who had none at all. Everyone was so sure they could read a pair of worn boots. Everyone was wrong.
I have been thinking about boots.
I had a pair I loved once. I wore them a long time. But the heels had worn down so unevenly that, without my ever quite noticing, they had changed the way I walked. And it was the changed walk — the small daily compensating, the leaning I did to keep my balance on an uneven sole — that eventually strained my knee, until some days I could hardly take a step without pain.
Those were careful days. I walked my children to school in the mornings breathing slowly and shallowly, because it was not only my knee that was healing. My ribs were mending too — they had been separated in an assault — and for a long while a deep breath, a wrong turn, a cough would catch sharp enough to stop me where I stood. I walked laps in the swimming pool each weekday - quiet careful lengths, breathing in the only rhythm my body could bear, and I let myself heal a little at a time. I was patient with it. I had learned, by then, to be patient with a great many things.
Because that was the truth of those boots. They did not injure me all at once. They wore me down slowly — in the constant reading of the ground beneath me, the bracing before each step, the trying to move just so, to predict where the next unevenness would come. I walked softly. I walked watchfully. I had grown so used to adjusting myself to the imbalance that I had almost forgotten what it was to simply walk — freely, evenly, without fear of the next painful step.
And of course the boots were never really the trouble. While I stood turning them over in my hands — toss them, mend them, shelve them — I was turning over something far larger and far harder to say: what to do about my marriage. It had worn me the very same way. Not all at once. A little at a time, most of it so quiet and so gradual that I could hardly have pointed to any single thing. There is an old picture of a frog set in a pot of water warmed so slowly that it never thinks to leap, until the water is boiling and it hasn’t the strength left to climb out. That was the part that frightened me most — not any one moment, but how gradual it had all been, how used to it I had grown, how quietly weakened, until I was no longer sure I had the strength left to jump.
And so I found myself standing at a small, ordinary decision that did not feel small or ordinary at all. What does a person do with a pair of boots like that?
Do I toss them out — admit that some things that hurt us simply cannot hold us up any longer, and let them go? Do I repair them — find someone who could re-sole them and set the footing right again? Do I set them on a shelf to collect dust, not quite letting go, not quite mending, just keeping them near? Do I get new ones and start clean? Or do I find a good used pair — because nothing walkable is ever truly new, and the real question was never whether they were perfect, but whether the wear was even, whether they could hold me up, whether I could walk in them without pain?
I did not know. I was writing it all out because writing was the only thing that loosened the knot in my chest. And while I was writing, my phone lit up. A text from my Bishop.
Bishop: How’s everything? Do you need anything?
Me: I’m writing, actually — it’s therapeutic. I’m trying to decide what to do with these old brown boots that hurt my knee.
Bishop: Toss out the shoes and let me help with the soul. Sunday?
Let me help with the soul.
He meant one thing, and he wrote another, and both of them were true at once — the sole a cobbler sets right, and the soul a good shepherd tends. The mending of the boot and the mending of the person, the same word, the same kindness, the same Sunday.
Yes. Sunday. My first meeting.
For the first time in many years, I felt peace settle over me like something warm. I was going to set those boots down. And I was going to let myself be helped. I had protected the abuser, had kept silent, didn't follow through with the police questioning me in the past...I thought only of how it would affect HIM... and so I remained silent...
To be continued…
With love,
Steffanie
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