A Box Marked Shoes

By Reaona Hemmingway
Memoir, July 2004

     On the first morning in my new house, I started looking for a box marked “Shoes” so that I could get dressed for church. Every muscle and joint in my body ached and complained about all the packing, moving, and unpacking I put it through during the past month. The fibromyalgia and tendonitis warred against my conditioned habit of waking up on Sunday morning to spend two hours away from the bed my fatigue craved. I ignored the magnetic draw of the bedroom and continued to look because without the box, the only shoes available for me to wear were the old, worn out, holey sneakers my feet refused to wear another minute.
     As I searched, I thought about how compared to some women, I possessed a limited footwear supply. All the shoes I owned fit into a three-foot by two-foot box about eighteen inches high. My shoe wardrobe included one pair of dressy black pumps, three pairs of flats, three pairs of casual shoes, one nice pair of tennis shoes for wearing with summer outfits, green flip flops, three pairs of slippers, three sets of boots, and my moccasins.
     After spending Saturday unpacking, there weren’t many boxes left in the house, but the box marked “Shoes” eluded me. I thought about my grandma’s shoe supply. When we moved her from Dodge City, the moving van came loaded with fifty-three wardrobe boxes filled with clothes, purses, hats, and, you guessed it, shoes. There were black, brown, white, cream, red, blue, green, and every color including rainbow. There were pumps, flats, tennis shoes, sandals, slippers, boots, and stilettos. All made from either suede, patent leather, snake skin, canvas, cork, calf skin, nylon net, and just about anything except cheap vinyl. They came in four different sizes and in all the fashionable brands while most of my shoes were bought at Wal-Mart. I often refer to Grandma as the Imelda Marcos of Dodge City, Kansas.
     During the first yard sale my family held after Grandma’s two-bedroom apartment ran out of room to hold what used to fit into a four-bedroom house, we sold seventy pairs of shoes. One man bought fifty pairs at two dollars for his wife. After we moved Grandma into an independent living facility, we held another yard sale where we sold off another sixty pairs of shoes. Certainly the supply would dwindle. It didn’t. With Grandma, shoes multiplied like rabbits.
     With all those shoes, Grandma could have worn a different pair every day of the year and never wear the same pair twice. But no, not Grandma. Every time I picked her up to go shopping, she wore the same pair of black patent leather pumps. The pumps were too big and clunked when she walked. She frequently complained that her shoes flopped. She often shuffled her feet to keep her floppy shoes from falling off. When I asked her why she didn’t wear a pair of shoes that fit, she said, “I don’t know.”
     Afraid that she would trip and fall in her floppy shoes, my dad took Grandma to Dillard’s to buy a new pair that fit. The salesman measured her foot and Dad walked around with her in the shoe department as she tried on new shoes until they found a pair that fit just right. But the next time she came to church, she wore the floppy shoes. I asked her why she didn’t wear her new shoes and again she said, “I don’t know.”
     Unless Dad reminded her, she never wore her new shoes. On one Saturday when I picked her up to go grocery shopping, I told her to wear her new shoes, but she didn’t know where they were. I looked all over her apartment and found boxes and boxes of shoes under the bed, in the closest, and stacked in corners. The shoe rabbits were breading again.
     When I finally found her new shoes and took her to the store, she complained that they hurt her feet. I asked her why she bought them if they hurt her feet. All she said was, “I don’t know.”
     A few months later, we moved Grandma into an Alzheimer’s facility and held another sale. We counted nearly a hundred shoe boxes. Most of the shoes were never worn. We separated them onto tables in four different sizes. When the sale ended, we still packed a dozen cardboard cartons with shoes for the charity thrift store to pick up. Finally, the shoe rabbits were spayed.
     With a shoe supply like Grandma’s I probably would have made it to church that first Sunday after I moved into my new house. Instead I sat down on the couch with my tired, sore joints and muscles and fell asleep with visions of shoe fairies dancing through my head.
     Later that evening, while unpacking more boxes, I finally found my one lonely box marked “Shoes.”

(c) 2010 Reaona Hemmingway