I hate my feet and everyone else’s feet and nothing is going to change that.

With the exception of beautiful baby piggy toes that smell like salty little flowers, I hate all feet and don’t even get me started about someone stroking someone’s soles or toes in an

erotic context. I nuzzle and cuddle my preschoolers’ feet and even tickle my older kids’ feet, but the older kids have the grace to feel as much disgust for their own feet as a normal person should.

For years, I thought feet might be better if they didn’t have toes, toes being the worst part of feet and toenails the worst part of toes.

And then I had a pedicure.

I want to emphasize that it didn’t change my feeling about my feet. But it had the effect on me that one of those Spandexy suits has under a tight piece of clothing.

It made the undesirable not desirable but better, ever so much better.

My friend Anne insisted that I go with her to have a manicure and a pedicure. Because I’m working on a book, my hands generally appear now as though I’ve been using them to dig rocks out of a field. But I have come to appreciate the civilizing effect of a manicure, and later that week, I was being inducted as a Boston Literary Light in a huge event at the Boston Public Library.

I balked at the foot thing. My feet are something I take out at night and quickly throw under a blanket because I can’t throw them under a train. “Peep-toe” shoes are just that for me, something that distracts from, rather than draws attention to my feet. I wear flip-flops with long summer dresses – particularly those that drag on the ground – and with chagrin.

But because I love Anne and didn’t want to seem to be sporting a pathology, I sat in the chair of shame and allowed a lovely young Thai woman to minister to my feet, which are connected to my ankles, for which I have no small amount of disdain. The color I chose was hula purple. I chose this in the spirit of going all the way into funny-head land instead of just tip-toeing (as it were) around the edges. All the while, Anne was babbling, “When I go home, I ask my husband Hilary to stroke my feet and say, ‘Don’t my feet feel soft?’ And I just love looking down at them because they’re so pretty. I say, ‘Hi, little feet.’ ”

Well, you know, I love Anne but she is very easily excited. And even after I’d had my pedicure, although I must confess that the experience did dress up my feet like a nice tie on a so-so suit, I did not feel the urge to have my feet stroked or pet or even admired.

I certainly did not want to say, “Hello, pretty little toes!”

But I wore my silver sandals with … not pride but something that was not unlike a pleasurable sense of calm that day.

And I’m going back.

What the virgin pedicure did was allow me, at least, to no longer wish that the front of my foot was just a flap of muscle on which I could balance. I’m not one with my toes. I don’t love or even like them. But I no longer want to leave them outside the house in bad weather and hope they melt.