A letter from a reader

At 63, I had worn the same white walking sneakers to everything for six years, right down to the family picture

Frank gave me the notebook I am writing this in as a Christmas present, and for three years it sat in the kitchen drawer with nothing in it but the number for the man who fixes the air conditioning. I am not a writer. And in sixty-three years I have never once thought it was 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 homecoming parade in Frank's old hometown on Friday, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

It started in July, at the family reunion out at the lake. Thirty-eight of us lined up on the dock steps for the picture, the way we do every summer, and a few weeks later my sister Sue mailed me a print of it. I had on my good blue sundress and the earrings Frank gave me for our anniversary. And at the very bottom of the picture, front row, there were my feet, in my white walking sneakers.

Sue called that evening to make sure it had come, and before I could even say thank you, she said it.

Peggy, you wore your mall-walking shoes to the family picture.

I laughed, and then I took the picture over to the lamp, and she was right. And not just the reunion. I went through the album in the hall closet. Easter, in the sneakers. Our anniversary supper, in the sneakers. My granddaughter's band concert, in the sneakers. Six years of them, under every nice thing I owned.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides to wear gym shoes to Easter. It happens one long afternoon at a time, until your sister holds up a photograph and there it is.

How it happens

I was not always like this. When I taught Sunday school I had a pair of navy pumps with a little bow on the toe, and the children used to say they could hear me coming down the hall.

What changed was not me. It was what I was being offered.

Go and look at the shoe aisle for women our age. On one side, the walking sneakers, cushioned and sensible and every one of them looking like it is on its way to the gym. On the other side, the nice boots, with a pointed toe and a skinny heel I would not trust on the church steps, that look lovely in the store and are back in the box by lunchtime.

So you do what I did. You wear the sneakers, because you have to stand at things, and at our age there is a great deal of standing at things. You wear them with jeans, and then with slacks, and then one day with your good blue sundress. Nobody says anything. That is the trouble.

What I had wrong

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

I thought looking nice and being able to stand all afternoon belonged to two different pairs of shoes. You could have one or the other, and somewhere around sixty I had picked standing.

It turns out that was never a choice I had to make.

It was only that nobody had ever put the two in the same shoe for me. A cushioned sole and a steady low heel, a zip so there is no bending over laces, and enough color and shape that it looks like I meant it. It took me until 63 to realize that was all I had been missing.

The boots are called the Romilly

They are from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women like us for a few years now.

They are called the Romilly. A soft ankle boot in a deep plum purple, the color of the grapes on Sue's arbor at the end of the summer, gently ruched over the front so it falls in soft folds instead of standing up stiff, with a zip up the side and a low, steady block heel. They come in black, blue, red and a sunny yellow as well, which I will come back to.

The sole has real cushioning in it, the shock-absorbing kind, and you notice it most on concrete. The whole boot is supportive and steady underfoot. The sole is anti-slip and holds on a slick kitchen floor or a wet sidewalk. They are light, and they are made to suit narrow and wide feet alike, which Sue, who has wide feet and has complained about it for sixty years, was very glad to hear.

Nothing fancy about any of it. Just a pair of boots where somebody remembered that we have to stand up in them.

What happened at the homecoming parade

Frank grew up in Ballinger, and most years we drive out for homecoming. The parade goes twice around the courthouse square on the Friday afternoon, the band and the floats and the homecoming court waving from borrowed convertibles, and the whole town stands on the curb for it.

I wore the purple ones for the first time. Three women asked me about them before the band had come around the second time. One of them was Lavonne, who has made the homecoming mums for half the county for twenty years and has never said a word to me that was not about ribbon.

She looked down at my feet, then up at me, and said, Well, Peggy, those have got some school spirit. The school colors are purple and gold. From Lavonne, that is a whole float.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I stopped thinking about my feet altogether. We stood on that curb for the best part of two hours, through the band and the floats and the fire truck at the end, and I did not once go looking for the bench outside the hardware store, which I have done every homecoming I can remember.

The next morning I put them straight back on for the early service before we drove home, and felt completely myself in them. That is the rarest sort of boot. The one that stands on a curb all afternoon and then walks up the church steps the next morning, and feels right on both.

Three things I have learned since

One. The zip is on the side. It runs up the side of the boot, so you open it wide, slip your foot in and zip up in one go. No laces to bend over, and after six years of double-knotting sneakers I had not realized how much I minded.

Two. Let them show. They look best with slim jeans or slacks that stop right at the top of the boot, so the ruching and the color get seen. With a skirt or a dress they are the nicest surprise, and they do not look one bit like I am headed to the gym.

Three. Order your usual size. They come from a US 4.5 up to an 11. I wear an 8 in everything, and the 8 fit the way an 8 should, even with my thicker fall socks.

About the price

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

The Romilly is $50.95. It was $102.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a pair of walking sneakers that looked tired by spring.

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 right now while the first of the fall stock comes in.

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 Miles had written, “I bought the purple to cheer myself up and ended up wearing them three days in a row. My husband asked if I owned any other shoes.”

Then I ordered the red pair as well, for Christmas Eve.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were out on the porch swing with two glasses of iced tea and the pecans dropping on the roof of the truck, this is what I would say.

If you have been wearing your walking sneakers with everything, and you have quietly decided that looking nice and lasting the afternoon cannot happen in the same pair of shoes, 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 looking at a photograph of yourself and liking what you see all the way down to the ground 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 right now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first, which I found out because the 8 in red was gone by the time I went back and I had to wait for it. And the first of the fall stock is already going, and once this stock is gone, it is gone.

Sue has asked for a copy of this year's homecoming picture. She says she wants one where she can see my feet.

Peggy