When I was a little girl and my father had died I remember sneaking into what had been my parent’s room, opening the closet door and lying on the floor next to my Daddy’s shoes. It was like having him near me once again. While his clothes returned to their original state after laundering or cleaning, his shoes retained the imprint of his feet. I suppose that if I had filled them with plaster and then taken out the resulting sculpture it would have been a perfect rendering of the feet that once moved him from one adventure after another in his very young life. Somehow his shoes were incredibly personal and so much a part of him and his personality. 

When my mother finally found the courage to remove his belongings I was quietly devastated. I did not want anyone to know how silly I was to want to keep his shoes for all time. I cried in the confines of my bedroom, knowing that another part of him was going away. 

Years later when my mother died, it was not her clothing that was the most difficult to send away, but her shoes. Once again her footwear became emblematic of her life. On her slippers and flats I saw the indentations that reminded me of her life. 

There is something so intensely moving about the shoes of a person who has died. It is as though the coverings for feet somehow retain the essence of the person who wore them. Perhaps that is why there was once a trend to take a baby’s first walking shoes and bronze them as a keepsake for all time. Maybe it is why the enormous pile of shoes in the National Holocaust Museum brought me to tears. Each set of footwear was a person, someone who had walked on this earth with all of the human feelings and experiences that were so normal until that terrible moment when everything changed. 

I have a pair of reindeer slippers that my friends Egon and Marita loaned to my daughter Maryellen when she was a toddler. They had purchased the shoes in Norway and were saving them for the time when they would have their own first child. In the meantime Marita was not successful in conceiving a baby so she sweetly suggested that Maryellen use the furry slippers until she outgrew them. 

Maryellen loved those slippers. She wore them all day long and threw enormous fits of anger whenever I tried to replace them with sturdier shoes. They seemed to be permanently glued to her feet until her toes began to curl inside because her feet had grown. Only then did she surrender the slippers. When I attempted to return them to Egon and Marita, they suggested that I keep them until they needed them. Sadly, they never had children and the tiny slippers remain in my cedar chest as a reminder of my loving friends and my independent minded daughter who has grown into a magnificent woman. 

Those slippers look as good as new save for the imprint of Maryellen’s tiny feet in the folds of the fur. They also are slightly damaged due to an encounter with a curious dog who seemed to think that they were actually a chew toy. Luckily I rescued them before they were totally ruined. Now they bring a smile to my face each time I glimpse them among the other treasures stored away inside the chest that was a gift when I graduated from college.

Some people are willing to wear hand me down shoes. I’ve never wanted to do that because it almost feels like a desecration to use them after someone else has embossed them and defined them. Besides I suspect that they would not be particularly comfortable because of the imprint of another person’s foot. The comfort of the original owner may not be the same for someone new. 

My Grandpa Little often told tales about shoes. Perhaps he had the same kind of reverence for them that I have. He once spoke of owning a pair of lace up boots as a young boy that were becoming ever more painful to wear because he had outgrown them. His grandmother insisted that he had to use them just a bit longer until she was able to afford to purchase a new pair for him. He laughed as he related how he solved his problem by taking a knife and cutting off the toes of the upper leather to free his feet from the cramped area. He admitted that he must have looked rather strange with his open toed boots, but his inventiveness allowed him to use them for several more months until his feet were literally hanging over the soles of each shoe and his grandmother agreed that it was time for some new ones. 

My mother often boasted that she was the youngest of eight children. She was proud of her ability to adjust to any situation which she believed had resulted from having to defend herself from her raucous siblings. She told me that until she learned how to sew and got a job to earn some money to purchase cloth she had never owned any article of clothing or pair shoes that were brand new. In fact she recalled that her shoes had often been used multiple times before they finally came to her, often with holes in the soles. She marveled at her mother’s ingenuity in finding cardboard to place in the bottom of the shoes to cover the worn spots of leather. Still, she took great joy in providing me and my brothers with brand new well fitting shoes that where often her greatest extravagance and gift to us.

I suppose that I have a kind of shoe fetish. Somehow of all the things that we wear, shoes seem to represent the most personal aspect of who we are. Shoes tell stories and whisper memories of the persons who wore them. It’s always difficult to let them go. They speak to us in such very personal ways.