SMALL PRETTY FEET

      For such a gentle woman...with such small pretty feet, she has left the largest footprints of anyone in my life.  And because others may or may  not have been there when she left them there with me, another person might never see them.  But my love leaves footprints that are felt more than seen, and she leaves them in some of the most amazing places.  She leaves them in places she has been and filled with her smile and the scent of her body. I can smell her in  everything she has touched, and I can tell when she has been in a room.  Even greater than what she gives to a room, are the smells that are now associated with her no matter where I go.  Of coffee that reminds me of her foot touching my calf, or of cinnamon that reminds me of Christmas and of the way she leans against me just to let me know she is there.  Of wine that is too sweet for me to drink, but that instantly reminds me of it on her lips.  Even of the scent of myself that is not the same as when it is mingled with hers.

      It comforts me to know that her voice and her laugh, will echo and reflect back and forth off the walls and the rocks of anywhere she has been.  Tinier and tinier, until it is but a shimmering ripple of sound,bouncing in smaller and smaller waves, but still there in every place that held her voice. But there are just as many that have been left by me for what I hold inside of myself with the thought of her.  As small as the tip of her shoe, but a legacy of my love for her is going to remain on this earth long after both of us are dead and gone.  People not even born may not ever know who we were or how we came to love each other, but there will be no doubt in the minds of anyone that the two of us existed in the hearts of each other.  Will it matter that our bodies will be nothing but ashes or dust?  Not if you understand that love is not to be measured by what is felt with the body that possesses it, but with what that body felt even after it is gone.

     If I could do one thing with her, it would be to leave her footprint or her echo in a way much more distinct than I have.  She deserves to be heard in the here and now for what she is while she lives, but I believe that I will leave a greater footprint of her life by letting  her impact stay silent.  A love letter found today by a person written yesterday, is worth very little.  But a letter found a thousand years from now will become as priceless to them as an artifact as it was to me who wrote it.  It matters not that the woman I wrote it for will never read it.  Only that yet another will know how much.

     It is quite unlikely that I would take her to every place on the planet, and there are some I would do anything I could from ever having her get near, but even those will feel her presence in my life.  Places too dangerous for her to go; of war and of death and decay that are unworthy of her for what they are now, may someday become a wholly different place.  And when it does, those who once knew nothing of love while we lived, will again feel it in what they find of me, and of her.

     Her picture, contained in a glass jar, now lays in the walls of a fortress  outpost Alexander The Great built nearly 1,700 years ago, and her name is scratched and drawn under the very stones he drove his armies over on his way to Persia.  Her footprints, even if not by her own feet, will at least be added to the greatest army the world has ever seen, by the impression she leaves in me.

     Diamonds the world will never see lay at the bottom of a river, and while I originally regretted their loss, I am comforted by the hundreds of millions of gallons of water which will pass over them.   They will lap the edges of the cliffs we floated past on trips alone, and caress the rocks where she touched me. What is emitted from them will, in time, be within every glass of water, in every cloud and raindrop around the world, become part of every snowflake, each ice topped mountain, and held within every glacier that will ever be. There will be more of them to be sure because that is just the nature of men towards those who love, but these were the first, and in a way that was not known to me at the time, deserved a permanence beyond my own mortal limitations.

     Perhaps her greatest footsteps and echoes will come from those people she has never met, but knew her by what others saw in me. If I am anything, it is because of her, and to impart that love for a woman to such a degree that a simple request to add to her footprint would be done so readily by others, is a testament to the knowledge that she touches more people than she can possibly imagine.  To have the people I know understand that, and to become the couriers of her footprint; to leave her echo amid their own worlds and lives, is to elevate a love beyond her own existence to a point of a legend.

      And so the couriers left our joint experiences  to return to their own lives and gardens in Britain leaving small stones on which are written her name, and mine.  They dot the hedgerows of Scotland, of window sills in Paris and of front stoops of houses in the mountains of Mongolia.  Small round colored stones have been dropped into the oceans of the world, skipped across the waters of the English Channel, and placed on the edge of the Indian Ocean. They are in horse ranches in Australia, a fireplace mantle in Austria, and in a rock garden in Japan, and even in the paving stones in front of my house.   They have been placed in the floors of royalty, and even dropped into the dirt to roll beneath the crypt of a Mongol king. They may one day unearth him for one reason or another, but those who do will also unearth a single stone with her name on it. She will even breathe life into death.

     Some of her footprints require no markers at all.  They are sacred to me, and me alone, and to add to the place she touched me would be to take away from that which it is.  Some of her impacts in this world are worth more to me than they ever would be to anyone else.  And so the gravel behind my house, on that small path where she leaned in to kiss me after saying I loved her, will never crunch beneath the tips of any one else's shoes quite like mine.  Small wonder that the gentle rubbing of a few grains of gravel would make the sound of walls crumbling and mountains being reduced to rubble at my feet.

     To tell those around you that you are loved is truly of little importance. That is to last for as long as you live, and no more. For your own self worth, not the worth of another. But to show the world that you love another is to take the small an insignificant life of your own and offer it up as a vehicle for another.  How often you do that, being the true measure of another persons worth to you.  Because love is not measured by what you can gain from it for yourself.  Love is what can be offered of yourself in order to make its impact to you, be measured by others. To do it in one lifetime is noble.  To do it in a way that touches the countless masses, the throng of humanity unborn, is to see the impact of a single person in what would take generations to define.

     And so the image of ladybugs will be scrawled into the walls of buildings in places where there never has been but a single one, and will never see another, except for hers.  perhaps lovers will find a picture of me and her and the letter I wrote explaining that this woman they see now was then, and and is again in their time, the most loved woman in the whole world to me. And even to other worlds.  If I did it correctly, her name even tumbles in the darkness of space and may, some day, be held with tentacles, or antenna, by something not even in our imaginations yet.

      Do I worry that someone may find them too soon?  No.  Not unless they travel to the very bottom of cold placid lakes, and at the base of thundering waterfalls, and even to small, flat, sun warmed rocks  with no more importance to us before we got there than they would be to anyone else after we left. the fact that they were in the middle of nowhere for us to enjoy alone will be enough to ensure their safety. No one would care to venture, nor expend the energy, to go to all of the places I cared to leave her footprint, whether I chose to go there or not.

     Such small and pretty feet to leave  impact so great within me.  Don't look for the impression in the ground for a giant among those who have been loved.  You will never see them.  But listen close in generations to come, because small things, leave hidden echoes, that, when opened, will become thunder to those who understand that the span of eons is but the blink of an eye to a person who wishes to leave the legacy of footprints for the woman he loved.  They are small, and rare and completely out of place for where they are going to be found.  But it is those very things that are often held in the hands of heroes as magic or lucky or powerful.  What better way to leave a footprint than to imagine that her strength that was in me will be the very piece that lends it to another.

     The labor of a man who loves a woman should never end. Not toil nor work, but labor. For who you are and what I know of you, those will not end until you yourself have dropped the last breath from your lips and slipped into memory and history.  There are many people who believe that to define love, one simply needs tell the tale of it .  And then again....there are those who simply refuse to believe that the story should ever end and that it will be written for as long as someone else continues to see it, or find it, or feel it.  Don't just say it and think it is enough for you or the woman you love. It isn't. Do it, and let what you have left in this world long after you have been silenced be the proof of what you said.

     And there is so much left to do before I am satisfied with the full measure of her footprint, both in myself, and how I will have her voice echo in the thoughts of others.  Treasures yet to be buried, fields and roadways to sow with wild flowers where she walked.  Into the tops of mountains, or deep below  in caverns that may never see the light  of the sun and stars yet to be named.  There are plenty of places I have not seen yet, and many I will revisit that I have been to before, that will know her name, say it as I have, and feel the impression of a footprint.

     Do I love you? More than you will ever know. Do I love you  enough? No, not yet.  Wait a millennium and let the ages try to comprehend what I am wont to attempt in a single lifetime.  Until then, my most favorite footsteps of hers will be the ones she has left on my heart.