I’ve been on a boot kick for about two years now, wearing only my Aérosoles Daria boots near daily for a year and a half or so. I had two pair: one brown, one faux patent leather. I wore the brown pair so much that the sole came apart from the boot and had to be tossed. The faux patent leather ones are still in the shoe rotation.
But I am on a buy it less often kick, and trying to buy better stuff that will last.
And I love my 10 inch LL Bean Bean boots, so I went looking for a taller version. And they exist…. In the form of a 16 inch boot sold in the men’s hunting section called Maine Hunting Shoes. But unfortunately they were discontinued in 2025.
I was undeterred.
eBay was the first stop, and there was a multitude of antique varieties, some with the original Vibram soles.
Poshmark was where I found these beauties. Apparently practically unworn, they smell brand new and the soles are clean.
Score. I haven’t given up on the 23-year old yellow Cherry Bomb Bamboo galoshes; they’ll stay in the closet for fun days.
But I am pretty sure I can live in these Maine Hunting Shoes daily forever.
Also: in the grand scheme of potentially-forever shoes, were not expensive. I paid $123 including shipping and tax on Poshmark.
I wore them for six hours today after disinfecting them, and they’re fantastic, comfortable, breathable enough with wool socks, and I can even get them on and off all by myself even though my spine is 2/3 fused.
So buy it/make it once doesn’t mean zero maintenance.
When I made this 6-ply jute crochet jute bag in February or so, I waxed it with melted beeswax then.
But beeswax wears down, so it has to be reapplied occasionally.
And the waxing cuts down on the jute shedding but does not eliminate it. So, the whole bag has to be emptied and vacuumed out and I used tape to catch the fibers still caught after the vacuuming.
And then I melted my wax, and used the dedicated brush I have for this purpose and went over the whole thing in the kitchen with melted beeswax. Then I went to our bathroom and used the hair dryer on high to melt the beeswax into the bag.
I did the waxing process twice when I made the bag to begin with, but doing it again every few months is probably going to be a good thing, at least for a while.
And while I didn’t do it when I put the straps on, I used leather conditioner on the straps today, too.
The longer luggage strap is permanently affixed— I used 2-part jeweler’s epoxy to permanent close the clasps to the bag.
Mama and Daddy gave me the 16 inch Holdfast stabilizer in 2018 or 2019, and it is perfect for days that I want a shorter strap— the luggage strap tucks in the bottom of the bag just right, as seen in this photo:
The Holdfast strap comes off on days I have my laptop in the bag, or on days it’s otherwise packed to the brim with camera gear.
In general though, Jared’s lining has proven to be hardy and holds up to my wear— I did manage to get an ink stain in the pocket and I tried the rubbing alcohol trick and while it didn’t completely do away with it, the stain does look more like a color block than a pen accident. The stain is deep enough to not be visible at all and is light, so it is just a part of the bag now.
I’ve decided when the lining does eventually wear out, I will use stitch removers and cut it out and we’ll just make a new one.
This bag is big enough to hold anything I want to carry on a regular basis…. If I remove the Holdfast strap I can fit my MacBook, a notebook, my paper calendar, and my camera with a lens attached. If I don’t have the MacBook in it I can carry a camera (or two) with two lenses in pouches.
I kept 4 other purses for days it’s either not practical or inappropriate to carry this big bag.
But I do love that it has turned out to be practical. Making bags like this has killed my purse addiction. It took 4 attempts to get one that was just right, and I don’t follow a pattern for these, I just stitch in the round till I decide it’s big enough, and then stitch till it’s tall enough. Not hard, except on my hands. Being able to make my own bags that fit my lifestyle better than anything I have ever found in stores has pretty much made it impossible to consider buying a purse off a shelf pretty much ever again.
And re-waxing with beeswax once every few months is just fine with me, if this will last me several years before I have to make another one.
Eventually I intend to try making a smaller one. Haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I bought these Bamboo boots at Cherry Bomb at L5P in September of 2003. I remember they were probably about $100 in a time I had zero business spending $100 on a pair of shoes that were impractical, that I absolutely did not need. I did not need rain galoshes at the time; I probably needed dress shoes for work.
Here they are, three minutes ago, in June of 2026.
These boots saw me through two winters in Iowa. I remember a guy in the parking lot while I was working at Grinnell Mutual pointing at me and laughing and telling me I needed real snow shoes. But these rubber boots are completely waterproof and skid proof: perfect for snow and ice.
Most of the past 23 years, they have lived in the back of my closet.
I bought myself two pairs of Aérosoles Daria boots in 2025 and wore them near daily the entire year; I separated the soles on the brown pair, completely wearing them out. The faux patent leather pair still survives but is on its last legs probably.
And so, these are coming out and into the rotation more often, in favor of buying new boots. I wear mostly blacks and grays anyway, so a little color doesn’t hurt. And I do still love them every bit as much as I did in 2003.
I have owned these boots half my lifetime, and I’m hoping they last the rest of it.
I wrote yesterday about exactly what psychosis looks like in my life.
Cue November of 1998. That is exactly the state of mind someone I know walked into my dorm room around 9 PM in the evening in November of 1998 ….. that warped center of the universe is the precise state of mind I was in at that time. My fourth manic/ psychotic episode at the time.
I can’t recall the storyline in question of that episode. Except that I was pretty sure I was the literal center of the universe…..that is a recurring theme in these episodes.
My room was a mess. I don’t know exactly why I had torn it apart. I’d stopped sleeping days before out of distress that a childhood friend had died in a car accident, probably stress about schoolwork, too. It was close to the end of the semester. I was in the process of supporting another friend through an abortion.
It took until February of 2010 to be able to admit to myself— to see clearly, even as my mind was ill— that he had raped me in my first actual sexual encounter with him in November of 1998.
I remember the day clearly that Jared first suggested that my first encounter with him had actually been sexual assault. I was standing in the hallway, he had come up in conversation, and Jared was standing at the kitchen sink of our Essex Drive house. I can picture the scene clearly, even over probably 17 years later.
I remember telling Jared, “No, it wasn’t like that.” I mean, there hadn’t been violence. He hadn’t had to hold me down. It certainly didn’t look like movie rape scenes. I mean, the sex had been my idea, probably. He was just agreeable.
I didn’t realize that the very fact that I had been manic to the point of psychosis at the time meant I was actually legally incapable of consent to sexual activity.
He had been in my room at the behest of the campus because they had contemplated forcing me to go to Grady’s psych ward against my will. It was his whole job that night in my room to determine whether they needed to come back and take me to the hospital.
And it was in that environment, that this person, who knew at the time I had never had sex with anyone, decided that having sex with me on that visit was a good idea.
I told him years later that I had always wanted to marry the first person I was with sexually. He said he hated when women said that. I shuddered in that moment, realizing he’d heard it before.
I remember sitting in the local friendly mental ward by myself late one night writing that February of 2010 (they allowed us markers and paper)….and writing about this person, and all of a sudden I wrote “RAPE,” in connection with wondering how that person was doing because I hadn’t talked to him in a while.
I think I must have screamed. I remember the doctor on call at the time ushering me into the refreshment room shortly after I wrote the word— otherwise I have no idea why in the world she would have been at my side—and she offered me some water, and having me describe what I had been writing about. I told her the whole story.
I don’t know for sure, but whatever she documented that night….I’m pretty sure at least a portion of my PTSD diagnosis is based on that hospital stay. I’ve never seen my own records.
Writing the word happened before I was conscious of what writing the word meant. I can’t describe the feeling of having an entire worldview— my entire known history with a person— flip like a switch precisely like that.
That probably happened on a Thursday. I know that because Saturday or Sunday would have been a visitation day, and I wasn’t allowed visitors the next visitation day. I wasn’t allowed visitors because I’d been injected with haldol and was pretty darn close to a drooling pool of mess. I remember collapsing under the medication counter, in grief, I remember the injection, and I remember that my eyes wouldn’t focus for a good long while after that.
I’d seen the group therapy leaders talking to people in session, telling them that they may not be able to focus or understand what was going on, and I remember being that person the session leader was glancing at as she said that, in the day or so that followed.
That is the shocked stupor that my system went into, realizing that maybe my sexual history was maybe, to all appearances, not as it had seemed in years prior.
See, that’s the thing about mental illness and psychosis. It’s not all delusions and disorganized thinking. Sometimes, in the midst of it all, there are piercing glimpses of actual, true reality in ways that my brain compensates to be blind against, for survival’s sake, in my regular daily life.
I got a withdrawal with hardship from four of my five classes that semester, in the Fall of 1998, thanks to documentation from my psychiatrist. My English teacher refused the W in favor of a WF because she had already distributed the final.
I’d still considered him a friend after I married Jared. The two of them never met, but they’d spoken on the phone because I wanted to talk to him while I was in a mental hospital after my Lamictal allergy in 2008.
He was always pretty forceful and leading in our rougly 4 years of active sexual activity, between 1998 and 2002 or so.
Jared takes it further, to define most if not all of those encounters as repeated assaults.
I used to complain that Jared was not forceful enough in his approach in the bedroom— I wanted to be “taken,” as I would tell him, sometimes close to tears in my disappointment.
I know now how those pleas must have pained Jared, as he understood exactly what my sexual past entailed, as he learned my needs and rhythms and how I understood sex was supposed to be, in realtime.
I told him last Fall that it was my literal cross to bear that my beloved alma mater continues to honor someone who probably never should have graduated had I had the wherewithal to report what had happened back in 1998.
And so, I sit here, on random Friday nights in Gallery Row, safe with Jared, and I try to write about other things.
And yet, my brain always goes back to the drama. The finding peace amidst the constant mental dissection seems to be my life’s work.
