(crud)

Only a few select barefoot soles of souls in this great country will have experienced the joys of perfect crud. If toes could talk, they’d ramble on poetically with odes full of similes to windowsill cooling cherry pies and creams of delicious wonders oozing from crusted crispy perfect donuts.
The apt and smiling baker makes these delights effortlessly, not bothering to remind the consumers of fattening sweets that it’s a conveyor oven programmed from several rounds of experimentation involving time, ingredients, and temperature. (One of these days I shall partake on a convincing sojourn spewing out the description of the warm taste-bud embrace of cardamom, my personal discovery of an ancient herb worthy of rivalling cinnamon.) Cardamom rolls will enhance the saliva gland’s squirting ability, adding profit to its makers.
But what of this other crud, Mother Nature’s own mystery, only discoverable by those hearing of its existence from some ramblings of happy old aunts wistfully reminiscing of pioneer days when barefoot was the norm? Ah … this stuff one has to search for, after the yearning has been planted, a seed from pleasant sounds of the aunt’s oohs and aahs and giggles.
There are some essential ingredients: rain, dirt of a particular clay-loam consistency, followed by heat from the sun. Quick heat, not slow heat, for a day or two. Only the experienced farmers sense an upcoming display, those perfect conditions only thrice a decade. Inexperienced urbanites need not apply for a quest to find heavenly crud.
But once discovered, joy reigns o’er the land, as those gathered to celebrate take off their shoes, and wait for the discoverer’s call to commence the sensual frolic. As toes burn from the heat atop the skin, weight breaks the crust, enabling foot digits to enter the cooling mud below. No foot massager well schooled in the faculty of Relax can compete with this, glorious wondrous silky mud, hidden under crud.