In the spring of '78 my girlfriend and I got an apartment together in Seattle, in a small hill-like neighborhood just east of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

The building frenzy that has engulfed Seattle in the third millennium had already begun in earnest even then, and, as the region's largest airport plowed up surrounding residential neighborhoods and turned them into runways and concourses, so also did it spur an uptick in the construction of first-class hotels.

We were poor. Katie worked in Seattle in the health care field, and I was still a student at the University of Washington when Sonny Sixkiller was on campus. Our entertainment ... our pastime activities ... usually were nothing more than long walks in the frequent drizzle.

We each started out with Celicas: mine, a red '77 GT Liftback ... hers, a green '74 coupe. But hers was paid for, while mine wasn't. And a parttime sales clerk in the men's department at Nordstrom's didn't earn enough to afford such a fine automobile AND tuition, so the liftback went away.

I generally rode the bus home from work, from downtown Seattle, and Katie picked me up from the bus stop on Highway 99 in front of the airport in her Celica. Usually. But if the weather was warm, she would sometimes actually walk the two miles from our loft apartment to the highway, and we'd walk home together.

On one such night, she walked. She had an umbrella because of the warm fragrant drizzle, and we started home.

We hadn't gone more than a half a mile when we came upon the building site for the future Hilton Hotel, then under construction. Earthmoving equipment was everywhere, and the soft fresh soil had been magically turned into luscious beds and quiet streams and undisturbed pools of delicious mud.

It was a Garden Of Eden, a paradise of sleeping construction equipment and sodden organic slime fresh from the pages of Genesis, all cloaked in shadow and the rich mingled aroma of earth and rain and spent diesel and jet fuel. Like Eve, Katie succumbed first. She had a heavy gray woolen coat, underneath which she wore black dress slacks and a white long-sleeve peach blouse with a buttoned vest, black dress socks, and sensible oxfords. I was wearing my standard-issue black dress slacks, black dress socks and shoes, white shirt and tie, and a favorite brown corduroy Nehru jacket.

Katie slipped off her oxfords and hesitantly took a few tiny steps into the mire. At first it meekly curled up over the insteps of her socks. Then suddenly she sank, loudly and wetly, with a little gasp and a heart-racing gurgling sound. I followed. Like Adam, I always did everything she did, always believing everything she told me.

We slogged through knee-high mud in our stocking feet for about half an hour in the warm Seattle rain, our progress highlighted and dimly outlined by the distant neon street lamps. After a while we sat on the doorstep of some sort of bulldozer, breathing heavily. She was 5', and I was 6'1, and it was an everyday thing for me to pick up her leg ... or even both of them ... and lay them across my lap. Only, this time, with her sitting on my right, I took her tiny Size 5 1/2 feet in both hands and massaged her muddy socked toes. She had such tiny toes!

Every once in a great while each of us experiences an elation as Heaven itself. That night, for me, was one such night. We were already soaked head to toe, and our clothes were already ruined from the waist down, so we lingered. I played This Little Piggy with all ten of her beautiful painted toes, each of them now swimming in the liquid ooze that filled her expensive dress socks. We both knew that someday ... soon ... this very ooze that had filled her socks and all the little spaces between her toes would lie hard packed beneath the mammoth concrete and steel foundation of a world-class hotel. So ... we lingered.

I lovingly scooped up a handful of watery mud, and rubbed the toes of her socks some more, relishing the sensation of pulling the fabric away from her toes a bit, and committing to memory the shape and the curve and the hard smoothness of each of her toenails. Another handful, and I rubbed the balls of each of her stocking feet. Another scoop, and I trowelled a thick sopping layer along the bottom of each sock, getting an almost magical high from the feel and smell of her silky dress socks meeting wet mire. Still another handful, and this time I laid it across the ribbed tops of her socks like a very lucky bricklayer, drunk with the sensation of her soft white insteps through soiled stockings. I spent what seems an eternity massaging her insteps, and working the wet earth into her socks beginning at her toe cleavage and slowly ... reverentially ... working back towards the ankles of her thin socks. They weren't thin as in sheers or trouser socks: they were like men's dress socks, with a flat-knit heel and toe and sole, and fine ribbing along the instep and up towards the cuff. The sensation of massaging her socked feet through mud ... of memorizing every little curve and shadow ... was intoxicating.

It got chilly, and we struggled to get up. We carried our shoes home, stopping occasionally to traipse through a chance puddle here and there to wash our socks off a bit.

Not my only Love & Mud memory. But definitely one of my best. As Maude tells Harold somewhere in the movie ..."...otherwise, ya' got nothin' to talk about in the locker room...".