My Aromatic Feet

I have aromatic feet. It is a curse.

I have learned over the years how to control the odor, to some extent; I always wear open toed shoes. The winter months are agonizing; my toes usually do not thaw until around the fourth of July.

Now that you know this much about me, please, allow me to throw in that I used to drive an old Ford pick up truck. The heater on that truck was a really good one and would get very hot about seven miles into the drive to work in the mornings.  One winter, at just about mile seven, with the heater revved up, I would begin to smell my feet. You have no idea how much I fretted that the people who visited my office cubicle would ask, “What stinks?"  I personally could not smell them in the office, but that was possibly because I had received such a strong whiff during my drive in. Heading toward home in the afternoons, at about seven miles into the trip, I would, once again, feel the heater blowing full blast on my feet and would soon need to roll a window down.

I tried creams, powders, deodorants, perfumes, vitamin E capsules and shots of Jim Beam.  I wasted my time and money because at mile seven, every day, to work and home again, I would know that I had failed.  I lost sleep, hair, finances, humor and some motor skills; the odor would not go away.

One afternoon, while just tooling down the road, I dropped an earring and when I arrived home I had to rummage around the floor board searching for it.  

I admit to finding many things under a car seat; melted lipsticks, pacifiers, over due library books, straws, mail, cans of green beans or corn, stray socks, even money, but never, ever, in my wildest dreams did I expect to find what I found that day.  Under the driver seat, under where I sat, where all of that wonderful Ford heat pointed to keep my feet warm, was a single serving beef, bean and cheese burrito that had escaped from a grocery sack. That rotten burrito would get cold when the truck was not running and as soon as the heater kicked in it would heat up enough to get real nasty.

I could not tell the difference between my own smelly feet and a stupid, rotten, beef, bean and cheese burrito!

That’s just not right.