My Right Foot

Here, if I can successfully cut and paste, is what I sent to our writer's group as an example of close focus description.

My mother used to say that she had pretty feet. I didn’t get it. Still don’t. I understand beautiful eyes, delicate hands, a shapely this or that and an overall sense of beauty, but feet? Does anyone really care?

MY RIGHT FOOT
By Doc Walton

It takes a double B, sometimes a triple A, size eleven shoe. This is a narrow foot, but better foot than mind. There’s not much arch left. Years of running and jumping in one sport or another have pretty much pounded it flat, although, truth be told, the arch wasn’t all that high to begin with. This would be a 4F foot if I were a WWII draftee. There’s the usual compliment of toes that start from the left as I look down with the widest one, a kind of pear shaped digit that has a very rounded toenail – worrisome that - and ends with the shortest and smallest on the far right that leans to the left and “spoons” nicely with the “piggy” that lives there. The two toes in between vary only in that one is a smidgeon taller and thus stands straight, proud and independent while the shorter looks for support from the toes to its right. All have neatly trimmed nails because I am, of course, a fastidious, well groomed guy, but mostly because I knew I was going to write this. The “big” toe however, has a nail that is chunky and thicker than the others and sports a yellowish tint that may be a result of its having been subjected to a misspent youth in which the toe itself was broken once and the nail blackened and fallen off on several less than memorable, usually embarrassing occasions. A horse tromping comes to mind. A healthy pink shines through the nails of all the other toes. Moving up the foot towards the ankle I can see cords of tendons that lead one apiece to each toe. These are crisscrossed by large blue arteries in a seemingly random pattern that look like major thoroughfares on a road map. Barely visible through the overall pale pink of the foot are dozens of purple hued smaller veins that appear and disappear like country roads on the same map. The under foot has very little arch, it too having been flattened by time. The “ball” of the foot, the area directly behind the toe bottoms, where one balances poised and ready for action in sports and flight, lacks now the calloused, tougher skin of its hey-day, but still has a harder shell than the rest of the foot which, for the most part is smooth as the proverbial baby’s bottom. The heel appearing at the far end of the foot is the narrowest part of the whole and ultimately my personal sports bane as it made me subject to frequent sprained ankles. Where the foot meets the ankle there is a bone protrusion on each side about which I have nothing to say other than damn it hurts when you clip one on a piece of furniture. The whole foot is hairless apart from some rogue shoots on the joint of the biggest toe. Years of removing the adhesive tape from wrapped ankles, a thing that includes all but the toes of the foot, have yanked out any hair that may have foolishly grown there. I am not limber enough these days to get my foot very close to my nose, but a whiff of yesterday’s socks suggests that colognes will not be inspired.
All in all it’s a foot lacking, I think, any sort of beauty. But then, sorry Mom, most do.