2 a.m. As is often the case, I am wide awake, unable to remember a night when I slept from the moment I read myself to sleep until the morning sun sliced through my bedroom shutters. I am a creature of the night — not creeping around, mind you, but rather lying in bed lost in deep, solitary thought.

Just now I threw off my covers, suddenly stifled by the electric blanket, and am now relishing in the coolness of the night, The brisk air floats over my body like the lifting and re-settling of chiffon in a breeze. I revel in both its touch and in this time of the night, not in the least minding that I am not asleep like the rest of my Austin neighbors. Strangely it does not in the least annoy, puzzle or dismay me. This is a sacred secreted time. It belongs to only me.

Such a nocturnal existence could not exist, of course, if I still shared a bed with my husband. As is the case with many couples who have spent more than half a century linked together, nighttime becomes a guarded and precious time, not wanting even the one you love most in the world to interrupt it. Indeed, I would venture a guess that many a half-century-old marriage has remained a half-century-old marriage simply by utilizing separate bedrooms!

I raise my head off the pillow and look down at myself. My nightgown is twisted around me exposing my legs. As I run my eyes down them, I suddenly run out of leg and am met by my two feet. I am struck by them. Such ignored appendages. Such extraordinarily underrated helpmates. Do I ever recognize them for credit due, for undaunted service throughout nearly eight decades?

How amazing that they can look this good after so many millions of steps! Why aren’t they worn to nubs, I wonder? There are no signs of bunions, corns or calluses, the toes are straight and the heels remain soft, uncracked and supple. The nails are only slightly wonky. Even the high arches retain their gentle domed curves, not sagging like some other parts of my body that I won’t get into here. Right now with my feet resting vertically on my bed, they appear almost youthful, the pull of gravity unable to fill the veins with blood which would surely reveal their true age. How have these two feet managed to survive so splendidly after a lifetime of wear and tear?

It must be my socks. I wear them 365 days of the year. They are labeled “The Softest Socks In the World.” It’s true. Their incredibly thick and soft threads swaddle my feet like they were newborn twins. In them, my feet are smiling. I know this because I can feel them doing so.

I marvel at other people’s feet, as well. The beauty of many of them take my breath away, while others cause me to recoil from the stark lack of it.

It is now 2:30 a.m. and my mind begins to drift to unforgettable feet I have met. One pair belonged to an old Okinawan farmer.  I’ll never forget the first time I met him. It was impossible to tell his height because he was bent over like a brittle corn flake. As for his weight, he appeared no heavier than my oldest son had been in 3rd grade. There was also no way of guessing his age for his hide seemed to have been tanned with him still in it. When he smiled, I could see every other tooth was missing and not necessarily in that order. It was love at first sight.

On his arms, legs and torso were just enough fat cells to sustain life. His feet had even less. Decades of interminable miles walked in sandals through dust and blistering sunshine — and then soaked in the mud of flooded rice fields — had somehow erased any line of demarcation between his toe skin and his toe nails. His feet looked like he was wearing little onion-skin gloves on each toe.

These feet belonged to a dear old friend who I talked about in length in Wondahful Mammaries. How could I forget him? How could I forget his feet? Sprouting randomly from his head were quiffs of thin gray hair peeking out from a rolled-up cloth tied around his forehead. Under it, his face skin resembled a piece of brown parchment paper that someone had scrunched up and then unsuccessfully attempted to smooth back out. He was the most shriveled-up, but fully functioning person I had ever met. But it was those feet — those remarkable onion skin feet — hat stick in my mind.

Another exceptional unforgettable pair of feet I met on a sidewalk in Taiwan. An old woman dressed in traditional, very outmoded clothing was hobbling about barely able to maintain her balance. I looked at her feet. They were tiny beyond imagination and wrapped in red embroidered satin. Her legs came down to points like two sharpened pencils. Her feet were bound! Of course I had known for many years about foot binding, but the custom was so old that such accursed women had all died long ago. Yet here she was, a holdout from another historical era, surely one of the very last of her kind.

Her foot binding began at age five when a lovingly devoted grandmother began wrapping her feet, carefully folding the four smaller toes down over the balls of her feet. The pain was excruciating, but her cries of agony were ignored because grandmother knew best. By warping and crippling her, she was creating a woman who would one day be not only sought after, but also adored by countless men. It was the way of things.

We in the West are jolted at the mere suggestion of this inhumane ritual, but it is true that not all that long ago a Chinese woman did not have a chance of marriage unless her feet were bound. Not only was she an object of great beauty to her husband, but she was also his captive as she could not run away to escape him. How could I ever forget looking upon such a brutal display of what one culture believed to be beautiful?

The third set of feet that stand out in my mind are for a completely different reason. I was in a Tokyo hospital recovering from surgery when another young American woman was rolled into my room. She had just come from the operating room. Both of her feet were thickly bandaged.

As I gradually came to know her, she told me that she had lived a lifetime of extreme pain. Finally when she was unable to bear the suffering any longer she had asked the surgeon to remove all the bones in her toes. With them gone, she felt she would be able to live an almost normal life.

The woman was not being rash in her decision and had carefully thought out her future. At that time … and it may still be true today … there were no toe bone replacement procedures. But, just in case that day would ever come, the woman had asked that all her toe skins be left intact for metal parts to some day be inserted into.

As the days went on, her feet were unwrapped exposing them. I’ll never forget the sight of those ten empty sacks flopping over themselves like birds hanging over the fence of a boneless chicken farm. She had a plan for tucking them under in her socks and then learning to balance all over again. I never knew the outcome for I never saw her again. She was, in essence, no more advanced than the bound-footed woman in Taiwan.

My final encounter with extraordinary feet was the sight of a leper on a Jakarta overpass. The toes were mere vestiges; countless injuries to them having occurred when the man no longer had any feeling left. The vicissitudes of his life had left him no choice in these feet. Only small squared off boxes remained on the ends of his legs.

By now you may be thinking about your own feet, reveling in the wonder of them. For you they walk, they run, they jump, they dance, bending to your every whim. And when they’re tired they deserve a hot water soak or at least a gentle rub. Cherish them. They are what hold you up, what steady you and move you about. They are the palpable platforms of your life.