Vestiges

I don’t like pedicures. The idea of someone messing with my feet, as ticklish as I am, and the general “ew”-factor of feet in general has made me reticent to ever put the personal grooming of my feet in the hands of another. I’ve had two pedicures in my whole life. One was before a girl’s weekend in Vegas and the other was the day before my wedding this past October.

I wore a hot pink mini-dress to my rehearsal dinner. It was pretty fierce, I admit. In a female bonding effort, my Mom took me for mani/pedis that Friday afternoon and I commissioned a flashy pink color for my toes that matched the dress spot-on. In my gold open-toed heels that night I got many comments on my hot-to-trot matching toes.

Were it not the middle of winter in New England and my feet not constantly swaddled by multiple layers of wool, I might still get the comments. Because, yes, my toes are still painted the same hot pink. I never took the polish off, never re-applied it, just let my toe-nails grow out with abandon. With all the aforementioned wool, no one but the H is seeing my toes again until at earliest April.

This may all sound rather gross and unkempt, and it is, I guess. But I have been nostalgically attached to my toe nails as the last physical remainder of my wedding. In a week or two the pink will have all but disappeared with the final click-clack of the nail clipper. A few times I got out the cotton balls and acetone, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, the last glimmer of pinkness reminded me of such happy memories. Plus, it became a bit of science experiment to gauge how fast my toenails grew out – turns out it takes almost 6 months to completely regrow a full nail's worth. Fascinating. Or not.

When the polish is gone, it will mark the decline of my newlywed status and I won’t have any remaining nails of my single self. It’s funny the things we look at and hold on to remind ourselves of time and memories. Almost makes the near foot-assault by the Asian man behind the face mask totally worth it.