Laughter and shoes

I don't have very many pictures of the two of us together.  I think we stop doing that when our kids get older.  It wasn't until Taryn died that I realized just how few videos I had of her as an adult.  I had so much of all the kids as babies but it tapers off and as they get older it's not as "cute" to take video and pictures all the time.  Plus the business of raising them gets in the way of all the photo shoots.  I regret that now.  I treasure any videos of her voice and her laughter.  Here's the link to the video of her laughing... 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kODBMLDNJqc

Shortly after she died I was talking to Adrian, her husband, and he was saying he needed to hear her laugh.  I found a video of her and a little puppy where she was laughing and I could feel the anxiety drain out of him when he heard it.  Like water to a stranded man in the desert.  Just that angelic sound of her laughter was all the medicine he needed.  She was so graceful too.  When she danced or walked or just floated through a room she was effortlessly elegant.  I admired her ability to do that even in sweat pants and and an over sized t-shirt.  The girl had class. 

I'm not sure where all that came from.  She was always a "girly girl" when she was little.  She liked wearing jewelry.  She matched her colors and loved to do up her hair.  She wore earrings and a necklace almost everywhere, unlike me who hardly ever wears jewelry.  My father owned a jewelry store when I was growing up so it just didn't stick.  He also owned a bakery for a short time and to this day I don't eat donuts either!  LOL  I wish he'd owned a pizza parlor so I could avoid THAT too hahaha.

Not Taryn though.  She loved glitter and sparkly stuff.  She had these long thin elegant little feet and as she grew her feet were always long.  She ended up with size 11 and that's big for a girl.  Not for a super model though.  I believe Elle McPhearson has size 12 feet.  Uma Thurman is size 11, so she's in good company.  Whenever I could find cool shoes in a size 11 I always bought them for her.  These shoes up there in that picture were one of my favorite finds.  These boots too.

Problem was those sparkle jelly shoes all the little girls loved to wear when she was about 8 or 9 years old.  Her adult size feet were too big for them and they didn't make them for adults.  She would look at them at the store and try and squeeze her feet into them and it just didn't work.  She'd get this sad little look on her face and I wanted to find some sparkle shoes for her.  This was before the Internet and being able to order special things online.  We were at the mercy of what PayLess Shoe Source carried.

That's one of the reasons she loved flip flops.  A size large flip flop always fit her feet.  She she wore them all the time.  If anyone had a pair she liked she'd steal them too.  LOL  My niece Heather, who is married to my sister's son Patricke, got to be tremendous friends with Taryn.  She called her, her baby cousin.  Heather has pretty small feet but would always buy large size flip flops because of how comfy they are.  Taryn would sneak them into her over night bag and take them home after spending a weekend or just wear them and forget she had them on.  Whenever Heather would come to our place to visit she'd find them in Taryn's closet and tease her about it.  Taryn would shrug her shoulders and pretend she didn't know how they got there.  

She had the best sense of humor.  That's the one thing I miss the most is laughing with her.  Being silly.  She didn't care what people thought and said what was on her mind and did what she felt was right.  She truly did dance like no one was watching.  She was real, honest and didn't care what anyone else thought.  That quality is so rare in the world.