The little dog earns his keep

Start with the reason everyone asks about them, because everyone does ask. On the toe of each slipper there is a little printed dachshund, a black sausage dog in a striped sweater with a tiny red hat, trotting along as if he owns the place. It should be silly. Somehow it is not. It is the sort of small, deliberate cheerfulness you want at seven in the morning when the coffee is going and nobody has said a word yet. The grandchildren greet the dogs before they greet me, and my daughter’s labrador has decided they are colleagues. I have decided not to mind either one.

The dog himself, on his stripes. The reason every conversation about these starts.

They go on standing up

There is no back to fight with and no heel to crush down. You step in the way you walk through a door, first thing in the morning, hands full of coffee and reading glasses, without switching on the hall light. The front holds your foot, the open back lets you in and out, and that is the whole job. It sounds a small thing. At my age, first thing, on the bottom stair, it is not a small thing at all.

On, in my own kitchen. Stepped into standing up, before the coffee had finished brewing.

The sole does not stop at the doormat

Turn them over and you find the part nobody tells you about slippers. A firm cream sole, slightly raised, with a textured wave design pressed across the whole of it, and it holds. On the smooth kitchen floor, on the cold tile in the hall, and on the wet porch steps outside when the trash needs taking out, the mail wants collecting, or something needs bringing in from the yard. The boutique calls the sole sturdy and made not to slip, and after the wearing I have given mine, I have no argument with either claim. This is what the woman next door knew and I did not. Her slippers do not end at the doormat, so neither does she.

Turned over on the back step. The wave tread underneath is the part that changes everything.

The footbed keeps its spring

Inside there is a soft plush footbed, deep and warm, and the boutique makes a point of saying it resists flattening with wear. That is exactly the claim to make to a woman with a back door full of pancaked slippers, so I have been paying attention. Weeks of morning to night wear on, mine still feel the way they did out of the box, and my feet stopped being cold in the kitchen the day they arrived. Warm without cooking you, soft without going to nothing. That is the balance the cheap pairs never manage.

They look chosen, not surrendered to

Most slippers announce that you have stopped trying. These do the opposite. The upper is a plush ribbed one, neat wide channels running front to back, with that rope of trim around the opening and again along the edge of the sole, and the pale lining showing at the back like a collar. They look like something from a nice store, deliberately picked, and I no longer do the little shuffle of shame when the doorbell rings. I answer the door. The dog on the toe does the introductions.

There is a pair for everyone in the house

They come in five colors, the coffee brown I have, a gray, a khaki, a pink and a white, the same little dog on every one. And the sizes run from a US 5.5 right up to a US 12.5, which is not a ladies’ range, it is a household range. Frank has been eyeing mine for two weeks and saying nothing, which from Frank is a full letter of interest, so the gray pair is on its way for him. My sister Sue saw mine over coffee and has already put in for the khaki, and the pink, I suspect, will end up on our granddaughter’s Christmas list without my help.