If I had to choose my most favorite thing about summer, it would probably be the ability to go barefoot. It seems silly, because there are so many wonderful things about summer, but this is one that can happen every day. I wait for sunflowers to grow in summer, but they aren’t blooming everyday. I wait for garden fresh tomato sandwiches, but the wait seems long. I wait for vacations that happen in summer, but vacations are a blip in time. I love the summer breeze blowing in the windows, but lately that hasn’t happened at all because it is so hot and the AC is on! So, something that I can do virtually every day in summer is go barefoot. Being barefoot takes me back to the days when I was a teenager and walked to the pool in my bare feet or back to when I was a lifeguard in college and was barefoot at work all day long! There is just something that feels wonderful to me about walking around in my bare feet outside and I’ve always felt that way.

I recently happened upon a video about grounding or “earthing” – you know when you go down a rabbit hole and have no idea how you got there, nor how to get back again? Yes, that kind of “happened upon”. I had never heard about grounding in this way before. In the video, the gentleman described grounding or earthing as connecting your bare feet – or skin – to the earth so that we absorb negative ions from the earth and neutralize our positively charged ions and allow us to soak up electrons from the earth’s surface. He also said that our immune system and our body in general works best when we have an abundance of electrons in our body. Honestly, I haven’t done any scientific reading on the subject, I think I’ll just go with it. Maybe this is why I love walking barefoot.

When I smell bleach, I remember a time when I would spend weeks in the summer at my grandmother’s house running around barefoot. My feet would be black at the end of the day. At night she would sit me on the side of the bathtub and make me wash my feet with a perfectly white washcloth. White was the only color washcloths she had. Bleach was how they stayed so white after washing our black feet. Bleach and scrubbing on the washboard. I could smell the bleach when I washed my feet. She didn’t want me to get dirt on the clean sheets, those perfectly crisp sheets that also smelled slightly of bleach mixed with sunshine. A week ago, I was pulling weeds and walking in the garden in my bare feet. When I came in, my feet were black. That night, I sat on the side of the tub, thought of my grandmother and washed my feet before getting into bed in my clean sheets. Yes, walking around outside barefoot is my favorite thing about summer…..though, the tomatoes aren’t ripe yet…I wonder if I will change my mind in a few weeks.