Summer toes

Back in the 1990s a group of female friends (most of whom I worked with at Greenpeace) gave me a gift certificate for my birthday. It was for a facial and pedicure. Not the first thing you’d think of as a gift from a bunch of enviro hippie chicks and I’m not sure which one of them came up with the idea, but it was lovely. Everyone deserves a bit of pampering now and then. It turned into a “thing”. We’d all clobber together to give the same bit of pampering to the others on their birthdays. (April was a bit expensive as three of them had birthdays that month.) I do love a pedicure, although I haven’t had one since a few years ago when my friend Irmani and I spent a night at a posh hotel in the Okanagan and I treated us both.

A few days ago I went to the beach with my friend Jean and her delightful dog, the wonderful Dexter.

Jean’s a keen swimmer. I’m not. (I nearly drowned when I was about seven years old.) She can’t swim when she has Dexter with her, because he freaks out, so there was no plan to go into the water that day. But it was a hot day and the water was inviting. Easy enough for her to role her capris up a bit and wade in up to her knees. Dexter went in as far as his ankles (do dogs have ankles?) and just barked frantically at her to come back.

He also barked at me when I yanked my skinny jeans up as far as I could and, for the first time in I don’t know how long, dipped my toes (well, up to my lower calves) in the sea.

I think it was looking at this photo after I got home that did it. These were not my summer toes. Yes, I could haphazardly slap some nail varnish on my myself. I’ve been doing that for years. I don’t know, maybe it was the memory of past pamperings, but that didn’t seem enough. So I asked the one friend I knew would know if there was anywhere on the island to get a decent pedicure and there was. And it actually wasn’t that expensive. (Certainly not compared to that posh hotel.)

Et voilà!

Summer toes!