Same legs / new appreciation

Body awareness, acceptance, and appreciation is a journey.

My Winter garden is typically a work in progress of prior year’s cleanup and emerging year’s preparation. My favorite task involves the laying down of clean cardboard to suppress weeds, covering the cardboard with mulch so it looks tidy, and envisioning the vegetable garden that will begin in Spring.

My legs in boots.

Cardboard is preferred to other weed suppressants (like landscape cloth) because it’s plentiful, decomposes and enriches the soil, and — my favorite reason — earthworms love eating cardboard and their castings (poop) feed the garden.

My boots

In addition to all sorts of wildlife native to Western North Carolina, we share the land with venomous snakes. After nearly stepping on a Copperhead while wearing strappy Chacos a few years ago, I am steadfast about wearing my Danner snake boots in the garden.

Knee-high for extra snakebite protection, the boots ship in a large, cardboard shoebox that is suitable for garden use.

My legs in boots

While moving some garden supplies recently, I noticed a message on the underlying cardboard: Boots are meant to take you somewhere. Go there.™

Immediately recognizing the catchy, Danner tagline, I pulled out my phone and snapped a photo of Danner’s message alongside my lovingly worn boots. The simple act of stepping into my snake boots takes me somewhere. My legs in these boots means I am headed to my happy place.

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👎 Same legs. I almost didn’t post the photo of my legs in boots today. My feet are huge and the boot laces are barely managing to span the width of my calves. Even today, after 60 years of living in these legs, I expect to look down and see the body I had anticipated during the years of attaching magazine clippings to my refrigerator door.

👍 New appreciation. My feet are solid and stable and they move me around my garden. My legs hold me steady in the river current after a spill out of a kayak or tube, just as they’ve carried my body step-by-step through incredible museums, castles and temples around the world. My legs stood alongside my spouse ✋ as we took our vows, they carried a baby to safety, and they (in this moment) hold the computer on my lap as I reinforce, once more, that I am strong and safe while being seen.

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I wrote about my legs almost four years ago after noticing my body type is largely inherited from my paternal grandmother. I used a tree metaphor to communicate the size and shape of my legs at the time (they’re still the same).

The reprint of the article is attached below because awareness, acceptance, and appreciation of my body is a journey. Thanks for being with me while I processed these thoughts. I’ll be hitting send in a moment, then stepping into my snake boots for an afternoon outside.

I am grateful.

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My Legs

The content below was originally published on 2 Aug 2021.

My legs ... I accept them as they are.

I accept them and, seven days ago in front of family — all thin and graceful — I said the words out loud. I referred to my legs as “tree trunk legs” because they are solid, stable, and rooted in the earth.

My family absorbed this revelation with empathy, although I imagine many anticipated my body acceptance problems — I grew up with a father who openly compared my legs to the Michelin Tire Man.

Later in the day, my nephew found me among the crowd of people at our family reunion. Waving an old photo of Grandma in the air with the excitement of a miner finding gold, he placed the photo in my hand and pointed to Grandma’s legs. “Tree trunks,” he said.

Grandma (center) and Aunt Bertie (left) on cruise to Barbados in the late 1970s.

Grandma died when I was 10 years old. Nearly 50 years later, I see her legs are my legs. I see her fine, thin hair, her hooded eyelids, double chin, sloping shoulders ... she is beautiful in this package of body parts that I share and have wished away.

Could I really have inherited so much from her and not known for so long? Evidently, yes.

This awareness soaks into my heart. Outside, the forest floor absorbs rain, nourishing the trees with trunks that hold beautiful branches and leaves and keep them grounded and strong.

I am grateful.