NF Bootmaker Milton Boot

I received my boots from Nathan on the eve of my wedding. Alas, it was still September, and i couldn’t yet wear them. Last year, I got engaged in my thunderdome boots, so it would have made for a good story to get married in this year’s pair. To have Nathan’s 32nd pair of boots is numerologically auspicious, but I won’t get mystical just yet. I was teaching a graduate seminar on the first of October, and wore my boots in the classroom. My wife and I returned to Croatia, shortly thereafter, and we wore our respective pairs—both in tonnages of Maryam horsebutt—around the ancient city center, striding along 1700-year old patinated stone alleys and on hikes up the city’s mountain forest park toward 800 year old hermitages built into the cliffs. We harvested olives in our friend’s family’s groves and made the grassiest, spiciest olive oil we’re still using today. We fought in our boots and made up in our boots. We walked our daily walks. We found and adopted a kitten we named Santa Mozzarella, because we love cheese and Italy. We bought vegetables in a foreign language from vegetable ladies who smile their wizened smiles, saying “Bravo” for using the proper words and syntax. We wore our pairs to Slovenia, where we climbed to a hilltop castle, to the Vipava Valley, where we drank wine with Slovenian, Italian, and Austrian winemakers. Boots, I made a point to say, are like wine; well-made ones age beautifully, only getting better with time. We wore our pairs through a pregnancy and a miscarriage. Time and story. Healing and being able to talk about loss. We drove the Mosel and Rhein River valleys in Germany, tasting wine with 5th and 6th generation winemakers in gothic estates. We celebrated. We fought. We made up. We learned from our mistakes how to be better people. It’s the life that we live and the miles that we walk and the boots, ever more than just leather, rubber, and thread, that become both vehicle and evidence of what is still being written.