We tend to think of inheritance as financial or heirlooms, or even stories. But there’s also genetics. Last year my Favorite Guy discovered he has a gene for a blood disorder, which may be why his father and grandfather both died in their forties. Why it took think long to show up, we have no idea? But it’s new technology, for which we’re grateful.
Besides letters and photos and stories, I inherited pes planus. Flat feet.
Babies are born with flat feet, according to the internet, and arches form as they begin to walk. Or not.
When my sis and I started swimming lessons, riding the school bus from Dexter to the pool in Adel, we noticed our wet footprints weren’t like the other kids’. More of a duck print than having that graceful swoop where the other kids had arches.
Laura Goff in front of her home with daughter Leora and their overflowing window box, Guthrie Center, Iowa, summer 1952. Her feet and ankles look like they ache.
Mom said we inherited our flat feet from Great Grandmother Laura Goff, and that she had as well. Great Grandma always wore black tie shoes and thickish tan stockings.
.
The winter before this photo was taken, she and Leora spent several weeks with Laura’s other daughter and a couple of sons, Wayne who lived in Pasadena. Leora and Wayne hiked to see the parade, but their mother, then age 83, was unable. Those darn flat feet cause everything to hurt when you get older.
.
When we were girls, Mom took us to a big-city foot specialist who prescribed rolling something round back and forth under our bare feet and picking up marbles with our toes to drop into a container. Also stiff inserts, which were uncomfortable.
.
But our flat feet didn’t seem to slow us down so we abandoned the painful inserts and the not helpful exercises.
Four generations of oldest daughters: Laura Goff, Leora Wilson, Doris Neal, Joy Neal, Guthrie Center, Iowa, 1950s. Three of the four with flat feet.
But age happens. Mom got so she couldn’t walk well anymore, so when the Good Feet Store came to town, she bought a set of their inserts. She was back to shopping, strolling up and down aisles with a cart.
.
During the worst of early fibromyalgia, I didn’t have the energy for walking. Before that, I regularly hiked three miles a day. But when I’d try to mosey a little, my feet and legs rebelled. I tried other inserts but ended up at the Good Feet Store where Mom had bought relief.
.
What a godsend! These aren’t cheap, but they work. It pretty well means tie shoes, but if I didn’t have these inserts, I couldn’t take an early morning stroll most days and enjoy another one at dusk. Oh, they are such favorite and grateful half hours of the day. Little brown bats in the air, fireflies glowing above neighboring lawns, an orb weaver beginning his nightly web, Venus gleaming above sundown.
I’m thankful Mom was able to enjoy relief, but I wish her Grandmother Goff could have as well. Laura Goff lived 94 years, from her birth three years after President Lincoln was assassinated until my freshman year in college.
Her stories are featured in Chapter 5 of Meadowlark Songs, from her birth in a log cabin to a few treasures she left behind. (I didn’t mention her flat feet.)
