The Sandals - RemembeRED

This week’s RemembeRED prompt was a photo prompt of a garden hose. Garden hoses mean summer and summer means sandals (at least that’s where my mind galloped off to with this one!)

The Sandals

I had dreams about them: cotton candy pink and neon blue and shocking coral danced through my head. I begged for them: plastic twisted into a basket-weave pattern with a barely discernable but ever-so-important kitten heel. Before I knew the word, I lusted over them: the Holy Grail of summer footwear in the eighties, at least as far as I was concerned.

Jelly shoes. Jellies. The only shoe that mattered when the days lengthened and temperatures climbed and humidity became almost visible in a thick cloud over Michigan.

“They’re plastic shoes. They won’t be comfortable,” my mom warned.

“Plastic’s flexible,” I countered, unconcerned with blisters in the face of fashion.

“Plastic doesn’t breathe at all. Your feet are going to be too hot,” my mom warned.

“The shoes are practically covered in holes! There’s lots of places for the air to come in,” I argued.

“You won’t be able to play in them,” my mom warned.

“But Mooooommmm...” I whined in the dramatic fashion that can only be conjured by pre-teen girls and Oscar-winning actresses.

Finally she relented, and we purchased them in true summer fashion, dug out of a wire bin of jelly shoes, stretchy elastic holding the pair together. I chose white, so I could wear them with everything, my perfect, coveted after shoes.

Wear them I did.

I wore them with sundresses, so pleased with the shiny newness of the white plastic footwear.

I wore them with shorts, feeling so sophisticated wearing what my friends’ older sisters were wearing.

I wore them with a sense of pride and camaraderie, perhaps my first foray into the crazy world of sharing opinions about fashions with my friends, trading shoes with friends for a few minutes to see what a different pair felt like on my happy toes.

I wore them around the house, where my parents hadn’t yet installed central air conditioning, savoring the way the heels tapped softly against the linoleum and ignoring the pull of the plastic against my skin.

I wore them to my brother’s soccer games, where blades of grass slid between the basket-weave pattern, tickling my toes for a while before becoming an annoyance.

I wore them to the park, where stones got lodged into the open plastic of the kitten heels and sand and dirt slid into the shoes, mixing with the sweat on my feet in a gritty mess.

I don’t think I complained about the discomfort or the sweat or the grime, even when I peeled my feet from the bottom of the shoes, leaving behind an outline of my toes and the balls of my feet, imprinted with the heat and dust of summer.

Happily, I suffered for fashion for the first time. Those shoes were worth a little dirt and sweat and a blister or two. I gladly slid them on day after day, the same way I now excitedly slide my foot into a pair of towering peep-toe heels when Ryan and I leave for a date night. Even back then, I knew the power of a beloved pair of shoes; like Cinderella’s glass slipper, the right shoes mean the possibilities are endless.