I had an East Coast friend once beg me, “Please don’t tell me you wear socks with your Birkenstocks!”  I laughed and wrote back, “I live in California: *everybody* wears socks with their Birkenstocks!” And handknit socks especially, if they’re knitters.

When Mel and Kris came here, I meant to take a picture of our feet together, but I was having too good a time to remember to.

I have two pairs of these, one I keep for looking good, one that got messed up in some flooding, so you might as well wear them for splashing in the rain anyway.  Which is why I went back and bought a second pair while they still had them in stock–I was afraid the first was going to reek and split when they dried and that I was going to have to toss them, but no. They’re pretty indestructible.  When Kris exclaimed over how new these looked, I had to explain I was simply putting my best foot forward.

When I saw the two of them the week before at the art fair, I was surprised to see she was wearing my Birkenstocks.  But it gets funnier: she had bought the exact same shoe in the exact same color in the exact same size at the exact same store I’m sure the exact same summer, despite the fact that she lived three if not four hours north of here at the time.  She’d been in the area for a fair and had stopped by the Birkenstock outlet in Gilroy too.  And there you go. We artsy creative types, we all dress in uniform, huh?

They live in Oregon now, though, so I guess we’ll have to let them skip the socks.