Once upon a time, in a faraway village, I walked into a shoe store, with only one object in my sights. The shop was tiny and smelled of leather and glue, for they repaired shoes as well as selling them, and along every wall were shoes of every shape and size, from house shoes to trainers to leather boots.

I had purchased several pairs of shoes here, the first on a snowy afternoon, when I wandered in wearing damp sneakers and was told, in no uncertain terms, that these were “the wrong shoes” for the season. And so they were. I had even had shoes repaired here, leather boots I’d bought the previous season and brought in to be reheeled. And it was on these boots, the brown version of the black ones I so loved already, that I’d set my sights today. High on a shelf, almost glowing in warm chestnut, were the tall boots of my dreams.

“Can I try these boots?” I asked in elementary German, pointing.

The shopkeeper raised her eyebrows and plucked the boots from the shelf.

“What size are you?” she asked, with a skeptical glance at my feet.

“Oh I’ll try them,” I evaded. I could see now that the Dream Boots were size 37, and my feet had long been a comfortable 39, 38 at a literal pinch. “They’ll, you know—” I faltered, unable to completely express my “I’ll break them in and make them fit!” energy to this implacable purveyor of footwear.

“What size are you?” she repeated, unmoved, with a stern shake of her head.

“Thirty-nine,” I sighed, and shopkeeper and boots disappeared, as if I’d uttered some numerical magic words.

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It’s my first time at the front of a classroom in a while. More than six years ago, I turned in my binders of eleventh grade English curriculum and the keys to my well-loved classroom, with its views of ever-changing hills, trees and river, and left the school, country and continent that had been the site of more than half of my career in teaching, in southwestern Germany. As I so gracefully expressed it at the time, it was “a pile of transitions,” from village to city, from one child to two, from Europe to America, and from working full time to spending nearly all my hours at home with two small children. Each of these changes came with their own grief and in their own time, little losses and gains I’ve been untangling bit by bit ever since.

As hard as it was to leave teaching, it was our home we missed most at first, the small town where my husband I met, fell in love, became a family. We missed the closeness of community, the spontaneous dinner plans and walks in the forest. We missed specific faces and voices, the neighbors whose proximity formed the comforting texture of our lives. We missed the sounds and smells of the country, the bells that divided our lives and the trips to the dairy for milk or a neighboring village for roses or bread. I especially missed biking everywhere, the slow speed at which I saw the landscape roll past.

And it hasn’t gone away, this longing for home, but I’m looking at it now from a distance, indeed from within the cozy walls of a new home. There are invitations to dinner or the zoo, to the museum or coffee or just to hang out in a living room. We have made good friends, some who I knew before who have been willing to embrace who I am now, and others who have only ever known me as a wife and a mom, and both kinds are precious. We still miss the bells, but through the still night air come summer concerts, parties around the block, and even the occasional tropical bird or monkey keening from the zoo down the street. My love affair with the bicycle continues, if in a slightly heftier form than when I bought a champagne-colored cruiser for 20 euros.

Teaching, though, has remained mostly in the past for me, lurking like the tarnishing silver teapot in my china cupboard and waiting for a bit of polish to return to use.

Today, I sit in a quiet Kindergarten classroom, waiting for the students to come in from lunch. I am not their teacher, but rather today’s Mystery Reader, a role I gained by having a daughter in this class, a bit of free time during the day, and a favorite children’s book I was willing to read to two dozen Kindergartners. Possessing all three qualifications, here I am.

---

I turned to leave the shoe store, discouraged by my failure to acquire the perfect boots, when the shopkeeper reappeared, holding the boots.

“Try these,” she commanded, thrusting them at me.

“But—” I hesitated, not wanting to remind her of the conversation we had just had about my apparently clownish feet.

“Thirty-eight,” the shopkeeper said, pointing to the numbers printed inside this new pair. “I have them in 38 also. Try these. Maybe they work.”

---

I used to dream about the kind of teaching job I would want when my youngest daughter started Kindergarten. She would start school and that same fall would see me installed in a high school somewhere, preferably the one where I started my career almost 20 years ago, teaching Language Arts to 150 teenagers. The grading might be a lot, I would ponder vaguely. But I’ve done it before! I can do it again!

I can hear the Kindergarteners before I can see them. They’re in the hallway, loudly speculating that the Mystery Reader is “prob’ly Ellie’s mom,” as they proceed to hang their coats in their cubbies. In a moment they’re around the corner, confirming that they were right! It is Ellie’s mom! They each pick a circle on the rug, sitting arrayed on the floor in front of me like a multiplication problem. Four rows of five five-year-olds. I wait for them to still enough, bouncing on their knees or rocking side to side on crossed legs, unable to contain their excitement for a Mystery Reader, and we were right!

“Has anyone here ever built a snowman?” I ask them, holding up Chris Britt’s The Most Perfect Snowman.

Tiny hands fill the space before my eyes, fingers reaching to the ceiling.

---

I walked out of the shoe shop with a new pair of leather boots. (They were still, to be clear, a bit of a stretch; my good fortune did not extend to having an extra size 39 brown pair in stock.) I wore them proudly to school the next day, to the compliments of coworkers and students, and at least once a week for a few years after that.

The irony is that I don’t wear them at all now, though I still have them. They’re not particularly in style, I suppose, as Chelsea boots and who knows what else have taken over the whole boot scene. I wouldn’t care much about that, but also where would I wear tall leather boots these days? And, final straw, I suspect that even these boots wouldn’t fit me now, my feet somewhat flattened out by those two nine-month stretches at which I gained some 50 pounds or so.

They’re not the first things I’ve outgrown, nor will they be the last. It’s only in adulthood that we hide our changing bodies as if this is some kind of failing, insisting that we should be able to fit into our wedding dresses or those jeans we bought on clearance or the high heels that used to deliver so many weekends of fun. My kids grow out of things all the time, and they discard them with glee, evidence that they’re still growing, changing, full of hope that the next thing, whatever it is, will be better, and will fit them.

Once upon a time, back when I was popping into German shoe stores and trying to buy boots in the wrong size, I would have described this Kindergarten classroom as the last possible job I’d ever want. Tiny kids? Who really couldn’t read, like, anything? Kids who might cry, or sneeze, or throw up, or possibly all of these in one day? These same 25 tiny kids all day long? Never. That will never be me, I thought.

This December day, I open my favorite snowman book, read well-loved words with the pronounced expression and interactive questioning strategies practiced in my graduate school literacy class, call on names that I’ve already learned most of, even though I’m not their teacher and it’s only December. And I know I’m just a guest and that I’m there for ten minutes and not all day, that I haven’t really taught them anything at all, but for once, I leave an elementary classroom and think, “You know, maybe. Maybe I could do something like this.”

I don’t have a real end to this story. With nine months left of graduate school, I have a mountain of papers and tests, projects and presentations between me and a degree that would qualify me to teach anyone younger than eleven. I’m a newly-minted certificated substitute with our district, and plan to use the next months to explore. I don’t know precisely where it will take me, or what comes next, but for a little while, I’ll be here, trying on shoes in every shape, color and size, hoping to find one that fits today’s feet.