The wind along the old street always carried the musty fragrance of aged wood and dried grass, mingled with the earthy smell of half-melted snow and damp mud. At the end of the cobblestone lane stood a little shoe-repair shop that had served the neighborhood faithfully for decades. Over time, relentless rain had completely eroded the characters on its worn wooden sign, leaving the business name illegible to passersby. Only the low wooden stool sitting outside still shone with a polished smoothness, as though the relentless passage of years had rubbed it thousands of times into a gleaming mirror.
My father’s hardworking hands were remarkably like that weather-worn stool. They were rough in the truest and most unforgiving sense of the word, scarred by decades of manual labor and harsh climate. His knuckles were cracked like dry earth during a severe drought, and black shoe polish seemed permanently embedded beneath his fingernails, no matter how vigorously he washed. When I was small, my father’s entire world was contained within a remarkably tiny space — a humble shop measuring less than 10 square meters, a sharp steel awl, a few spools of tough hemp cord, and me sitting quietly in the corner.
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