I write to you from a quiet house where a little dog lies next to me on my bed. The room is a half-packed, unlaundered disaster zone. I leave on Tuesday, which is surreal, but I also feel very full.

I don’t really have anything to say about any of that. I just have two things to tell you.

The first is this: I’m getting rid of my gold shoes. If you know me, you probably know the ones. They’re sparkly Steve Madden loafers, entirely covered in spiky gold studs. My sister found them for me at a thrift store when I was in college. Once I wore them to church, and a little boy who was about two or three walked up to me and stared down at them in awe. “They’re beautiful…” he whispered. And he threw himself down on his tummy on the carpet and embraced them. He never once looked up at my face, but that’s okay. I understood. The first day I’d ever worn them my feet bled, and I panicked not about the blisters but about whether the blood would stain them. There’s just something about them that inspires adoration, devotion, respect. Later, I sometimes wore them while teaching and a student, usually male, would comment on their sharpness. “Yeah,” I’d say, “They’re dangerous,” and I’d mime a little kick. He’d then look nervous for the rest of class. I wore them here in Vancouver too, especially at first, leaving them inside the front door of any house I was visiting according to polite Canadian custom, in the pile of everyone else’s Blundstone boots, loud and brash in the middle of all the slick brown. I’ve had them for ten years now and when I mentioned offhandedly a couple weeks ago to a group of friends that it was probably time to get rid of them, the idea was met with shock and flat denial. But despite that, it is time. Spikes and glitter have worn off in spots, and in one place beneath, a rip is growing in the fabric. I wear things hard. But I’d like to think that’s a sign that I’ve lived in them, properly lived. I look at them and am satisfied.

The other thing I wanted to tell you is that the other day I was sitting at Quilchena Park, waiting for a friend, and a little girl and her grandfather passed me. She was maybe six or seven, and they weren’t talking but were clearly headed somewhere on purpose. As they walked away across the grass I saw that each kept reaching out for the other’s hand, in an absent-minded, habitual gesture, but they took it in turns, so they kept missing each other. Him and then her and then him and then her. I couldn’t see their faces of course, but from my increasingly distant vantage point, neither seemed to mind the failure of their little attempts. They were focusing on their destination, wherever that was. They’d find the other’s hand eventually. When they really, really needed it.