A letter from a reader

At 63, I owned four pairs of boots and the weather to wear them about ten days a year

There are four pairs of boots in my closet and I love every one of them. Cognac, buckles, a heel that means business, the whole look. I live in Austin, Texas. I am 63, I am not a writer, and I can tell you from long experience that this town gives a woman about ten boot days a year, and I spend the other three hundred and fifty-five looking at them.

Then three different women asked me about my shoes at brunch on Sunday, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

Here is how the boot problem goes. Every October the first cool morning arrives and I put the boots on, and by lunch the cool morning has become an eighty-degree afternoon and I am sitting in a restaurant with my feet cooking, smiling. Then they go back in the closet until January, come out for a week, and go back again. So for most of the year I settle. Sandals, flats, whatever is cool, none of it the look I actually love, and in every photograph from March to November I look like a woman who has given up on her feet.

The boots I love, ten days a year, or the sandals I settle for. For years I settled for eleven months.

Nobody decides to dress like the weather won. It happens one warm October at a time, until the closet is full of shoes you love and cannot wear, and shoes you wear and do not love.

Then Marianne came to church in a pair in April

Marianne lives across the street and has the same boot problem I do, and one warm Sunday in April she came out of her front door in what I would have sworn from the porch was a pair of cognac ankle boots. Closer, they were not. The front was all boot, three buckled straps across the ankle and a stacked heel, but the sides were cut away, open, and she said she had worn them to a wedding in September and a dinner in June and her feet had been fine at both.

They are called the Bridget, from Iris & Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now. I ordered the brown that evening, fully expecting to send them back.

They did not go back. The boots are still in the closet, and I have stopped waiting for them.

What happened at brunch

I wore them on Sunday with a denim skirt and a white blouse, on a patio, in August, and my feet were fine through two courses and a second coffee.

Three different women asked me where they were from before the food came out. And Sue, who has known me twenty years and has never said a kind word about a shoe, said I finally looked like myself again. From Sue, that is a parade.

Here is why they work, as far as I can tell. From the front they are a boot, cognac and buckled and serious. The sides are cut away, so the air gets in and they wear like a sandal in the heat. The heel is a stacked block, wide where it meets the ground, so on a patio or a church step there is nothing to wobble on. The three straps buckle to where you want them and then hold, and there is a zip at the back so you are not undoing three buckles every morning. And they are cushioned inside, which after a lifetime of pretty shoes that were not, I noticed on the first day.

They have been out five times in nine days. To brunch, to a dinner, to church, and to the store on a Tuesday for no reason except that I wanted to. The boots have not moved. Frank asked if I was planning to give them away. I am not, but I understand the question.

Three things I have learned since

One. It was never the boot I loved. It was the front of the boot. The straps, the buckles, the heel. Give me those and cut the sides away, and I have the look for nine months instead of ten days.

Two. The zip is the whole trick. Three buckles look wonderful and take a minute a foot. Set them once, and the zip at the back does the rest, every morning, in one motion.

Three. Eight colours, honest sizes. The cognac I own, a black, a red, a white, a darker brown, and three snake prints for the brave, from a 4 all the way to an 11. I went back for the black. Marianne, I am told, has the snake.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Bridget is $66.95. It was $134.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because a shoe that looks like a good boot from the front usually costs what a good boot costs.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and this is their final summer sale as they close this chapter of the shop.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, “Looks like my favorite boot, wears like a sandal. Wore them to a dinner in July and my feet were fine. The zip at the back is genius.” That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on the porch with an iced tea and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you own boots you love and a climate that will not let you wear them, you are not being impractical. You have a look that is yours and a thermometer that disagrees. This is the shoe that settles the argument, and it does it for nine months of the year instead of ten days.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the cognac goes first. And once this stock is gone, it is gone.

The boots are still in the closet. I have stopped waiting for them.

Peggy