Summer heat means summer feet

While it's not officially summer, my feet have declared that it has begun early.

And how, you ask, do my feet relay this notice?

For starters, the skin on my heels starts looking like a 3-D map of Earth's plate tectonics, complete with the shale-like lifting of large, crusty scales of callous.
This seems to be a genetic problem in my family - no matter how much attention we put on our feet with nightly exfoliation, regular scrubbing, and fanatic moisturizing, we all get these crunchy summer feet. Still I refuse to give up sandals: my feet set themselves on fire otherwise.

Secondly, they start to smell like something awful - not quite offal, but getting there - even while wearing sandals. I had my ankle crossed over my knee today and I smelled something that seemed like a mix of bad soup, metal, and damp towels and realized to my horror that it was my slightly moist foot in emitting this foul odour within my oversized kids' sandal.

There's an old adage that goes, "bare feet don't stink." But I think someone must have gotten that wrong somewhere down the line. It must be, "bear feet don't stink." As coined by Jeremy "Lucky Man" Lyons who was attacked by a grizzly who stood on his face for an hour before accepting he was finally dead. Lucky Man Lyons probably crawled back to town and uttered these, his dying words.*

*No, there's no such person as Jeremy "Lucky Man" Lyons, but I encourage you to spread that lie to your children and pass it off as real history. Like Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, or Richard Nixon.