A letter from a reader

At 63, my grandson looked down at my feet in the church parking lot and asked if Grandma was allowed to wear slippers outside

The only thing I have written down since September is how many pounds of pecans we picked, in pencil on the back of the kitchen calendar, and Frank says my numbers get more generous every year. I am not a writer, and it has never once been my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on her feet.

But three different women asked me about my boots at the pecan orchard out past McQueeney on Saturday, and I have now explained them enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

It really started last November, on the first properly cold Sunday of the year. My grandson is six and stays with us most weekends, so he comes to church with Frank and me. We were walking across the parking lot after the service, him holding my hand, and he looked down at my feet, and then up at me, very serious, and asked it.

Grandma, are you allowed to wear your slippers outside?

I laughed, and then I looked down, and there they were. My gray fleece house slippers, the ones with the flattened backs, on the church parking lot, with my good navy skirt. I had put them on that morning to let the dog out and simply never taken them off. And if I am honest, it was not the first time. They had been to the mailbox, to the car, to the pharmacy drive-through, and once, all the way round the grocery store.

I did not decide to become the woman in slippers at church. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody sits down and chooses that. It happens quietly, one cold morning at a time, until a six-year-old says it out loud in front of the whole congregation.

How it happens

I used to love a good pair of fall boots. In my forties I had a brown pair with a little heel that I wore to every football game and every Thanksgiving, and I could have walked to Dallas in them.

What changed was not me. It was the shoe stores.

Go and look the next time you are out. On one side, boots made for a thirty-year-old, with a zipper down the side and a heel and a toe that pinches by lunchtime. On the other side, the comfortable shoes, which all seem to come in one shade of beige and look like they were designed by somebody who has never once been invited anywhere. So you get two choices. Hurt your feet and look like yourself. Or be comfortable and look like you gave up.

So most mornings I chose comfortable, and comfortable was my house slippers. Nobody ever said anything, which is rather the point. Until somebody three and a half feet tall did.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have.

I thought that anything warm and soft and easy to get on was going to look like a slipper. That it was the price of comfort. If you want your feet to feel good, you look like you are on your way to bed.

It turns out that was never it.

My daughter showed me, without meaning to. She drove up from Belton the first cold weekend this October, came in through the back door in a pair of gray ankle boots with a little white rim at the top, and stepped straight out of them on the mat without bending down. I picked one up while she was pouring her coffee. Soft as anything inside, and from the outside it was a real boot, the kind you would wear to lunch. She saw me holding it and said, Mama, they are your slippers. They just went to finishing school.

That is the difference. Not how comfortable a shoe is. Whether anybody can tell.

The boots are called the Mavis

They are from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly looking after women our age for a few years now. My daughter sent me the link before she had finished her coffee, and I ordered that same evening.

The boots are called the Mavis. A low ankle boot in a soft oatmeal, which is the one I chose, with a stitched seam running around the toe and along each side, a white plush lining that just shows at the top, a little tab at the back for pulling them on, and a flat sole. They come in brown, gray and black as well, but I wanted something that went with every pair of jeans I own.

You slide them on. No laces, no zippers, no sitting on the bottom stair with a shoehorn while Frank asks if I need a hand. The soft cushioning keeps my feet comfortable from the morning until the evening, and the plush lining keeps them warm on the kind of gray morning we have been getting since the first norther came through.

That is really all there is to it. Nothing complicated. Just a boot somebody thought about.

What happened at the pecan orchard

Every fall Frank and I take our grandson out to a pick-your-own pecan orchard past McQueeney, and every fall we come home with more than any two people could crack by Christmas. It rained all night on Friday, so by Saturday morning the grass under those trees was soaking and the fallen leaves were slick as anything. I wore the Mavis anyway. The sole is non-slip, and on that wet grass the grip was the first thing I noticed.

The first woman asked me before we had filled our first bucket, a grandmother at the next tree over with two little ones and a red wagon. The second was the teenage girl weighing the bags at the shed, who wanted to know if they came in black. And then there was Glenda.

Glenda has run the weighing shed out there for thirty years. In all that time I have never heard her say a word about anything except the crop and the price per pound. She was writing up our ticket at the picnic table by the scales, looked down at my feet, looked at them a while longer, and said, Peggy, those are the first sensible shoes I have ever seen out here that do not look sensible. From Glenda, that is practically a hug.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I forgot about my feet entirely. Two hours of bending and crouching and walking up and down the rows, and I did not think about them once.

The next morning I wore them to church. Same parking lot. My grandson looked down at them as we got out of the truck and asked, very carefully, whether those were my church shoes or my outside shoes. I told him they were both. He seemed to find that acceptable.

Three things I have learned since

One. Easy on is not a small thing. There is no zipper to catch and no laces to bend down to. You step in and pull the little tab at the back and you are gone. On a morning when I am running late for church, that is the difference between real shoes and the slippers.

Two. The sole matters more than I thought. Between wet grass, wet leaves on the porch and the church parking lot after a rain, I had not realized how much I wanted a non-slip sole with some grip on wet or slippery ground until I had one.

Three. Comfortable does not have to look like you gave up. The cushioning is soft and they are warm inside, but nobody who sees them would guess any of that. They go with jeans, with leggings, with my good pants on a Sunday, and they look like I chose them on purpose, which I did.

About the price

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

The Mavis is $49.95. It was $100.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a pair of boots I wore twice and then gave to the church rummage sale.

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 they have a sale on at the moment.

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 more. One woman from Stockdale had written, “I wear mine to feed the chickens in the morning and to my granddaughter’s volleyball game at night. Nobody has ever guessed how comfortable they are.”

Then I ordered the brown ones as well.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on my back porch with a bowl of pecans between us and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have spent the last few winters choosing between boots that pinch and slippers you hope nobody notices, not because you have stopped caring but because the stores never gave you a third choice, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a pair of boots will change your life. They will not. But there is something in walking out of the house in the morning warm and comfortable and looking like yourself that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first, so I would not wait for the first real cold snap. And once this stock is gone, it is gone.

The slippers live under the bed now. The Mavis goes everywhere else.

Peggy