{"id":35,"date":"2006-12-27T08:47:29","date_gmt":"2006-12-27T16:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2006\/12\/shoes\/"},"modified":"2006-12-27T08:48:35","modified_gmt":"2006-12-27T16:48:35","slug":"shoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/2006\/12\/shoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Shoes"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was my first article published in<\/em> The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994.<\/em><\/p>\n

I’m trying to figure things out in Nome. So, before I arrived, I watched a special on television on the Iditarod to help me figure things out. I noticed that everybody at the Nome finish line had on lots of clothes: boots as big as tree trunks, parkas with huge fur ruffs that obscured their faces, gloves and mittens that dwarfed their arms. I turned to my children and announced glumly, “It’s going to be cold.”<\/p>\n

And I was right. It was cold when we first arrived in mid-April. We bundled up. I wore my Raichle Vibram sole hiking boots and my husband pulled on his L. L. Bean hunting shoes. Boy, were we feeling Alaskan!<\/p>\n

Then it warmed up. The cross-country, hiking, and stiff glacier boots I’d brought all the way from muggy Houston aren’t getting anywhere near the kind of use now that I thought they would after I watched that special. It’s probably time to get out some other shoes.<\/p>\n

So, now that the mud is drying out and I haven’t found any tv specials on Arctic summers to help me, I thought I’d better look around at what Nomeites have on their feet. So at the post office, AC, Hanson’s, the swimming pool, I’m looking at shoes. I saw lots of white tennis shoes. Now, my cousin in Minneapolis warned me about this. She said “tennis shoe weather” is a very short season in the north country. You wear them when you can.<\/p>\n

I have a pair of white tennis shoes. It’s just that boots on my feet are more a picture I had of myself living in Alaska. Sturdy. Fearlessly striding across the tundra. I wore the white tennis shoes almost everyday in Texas. After all, I’m an Alaskan now. I think I’ll wear the boots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was my first article published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994. I’m trying to figure things out in Nome. So, before I arrived, I watched a special on television on the Iditarod to help me figure things out. I noticed that everybody at the Nome finish line had on lots of clothes: boots as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathygrossman.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}