What is it about immigrant women from the desh refusing to don winter appropriate footwear? Its pretty much a cliché, but one that used to rake my mind until about last year, when I had an analysis session with a friend following a particularly precipitous winter day. We were both blinking away tears by the time we were done.
Granita, sorbet, Sno Cone – leaning against cars, watching in amusement as kids skid and slip their way to classes – these are some names we come up with for various kinds of snow and ice that makes life miserable for a good 3-4 months.
Like the Eskimo, who have over 90 names for frozen water, this took some deliberation and argument. Despite our differences of opinions, we agree that one must get to know snow and ice on a deeply personal, contact level to arrive at a pet name basis.
What better way to make acquaintance with them than feel them permeate through your socks? And what better way to ensure this than buy end of season shoes on sale in various big box stores?
The reason of our analyses is a lady we both know. She is a fellow deshi, and a parent at the school. Every year, she gets a little more enterprising, she walks a little further, takes on a little more. We have known her for several years, and have yet to see her in winter appropriate footwear.
The first year, she wore a pair of fake suede pumps with what looked like cardboard soles. Everyone speculated it must have been like walking around with dish towels wrapped around the feet.
Miraculously, they held up throughout the winter. It was only shortly before spring that rigor mortis set in the shoes, not her. Mercifully. They crinkled and stiffened from all the salt. Those, we decided, were the pickled mummies, preserved to be excavated intact ages into the future; a testament to a temperate climate voyager’s journey in harsh climates.
On the second year, it was a pair of backless sneakers. That was also the year the lady in question had acquired her driver’s license. I remember two things in retrospect. It was a particularly snowy winter, with knee high snow on the side walks, and her elder child had started school.
While the preschooler scampered over frozen ground like an Arctic fox, the infant travelled in various portable devices: car seat, stroller, baby sling, car seat in the stroller, etc. Getting the car seat in and out of the car meant the mother had to stand precariously planted in the snow, fixing and affixing various harnesses and straps.
I didn’t know whether to look away then, or look away when she ignored the sneering looks of glam squad mummies. I mean the sneakers were iridescent blue, and chunky. Neither in a good way. Those were the “gangsta” shoes without the attitude. There are only a few things sadder than that. One of them being sagging tattoos.
The third pair was ballet flats. I had seen them at my least favourite conscience-free retailer. Priced regularly at $6, on sale for two, costing maybe $0.05 each. What was saved on labour, was further endorsed in poor quality. Papier mache soles, fleshly hued and gelatin glued. I feared for their integrity, and the safety of the wearer, every time it neared the freezing mark.
She took to wearing them with thick socks during winter, pirouetting and leaping across wet stretches and icy patches with feline grace. With any other shoes, the effects would have been unnecessarily sad. They were the Bolshoi flats.
The fourth were a pair of Dr Scholls. They didn’t seize up with fluctuating temperatures, and were good while they lasted. And last they did for a long time. She wore them long enough for the baby to outgrow his stroller, and the little girls to outgrow Hanna Montana phase, and for Miley Cyrus to grow into an existential crises. Then they were just as good as the cardboard ones, unable to keep out the elements. Cracked and busted, they looked suicidal. They were the been-here-done-that traders.
This fall, she brought weight loss shoes. You know the kind – tipping platforms, designed to keep the wearer moving in search of balance. When Environment Canada announced its hunch about a real winter, someone hinted to her maybe this was the year she needed Arctic worthy shoes.
She held her ground about buying shoes on sale. Her point being what goes on sale is not a choice, but each step afterwards is. She said “a shoe is only a shoe.”
But a shoe is not quite a shoe. Like everything else, it has a history and a story. Typically, it is a curated or documented one around a culture or motion picture. And then, there is an unsung, invisible one. Like everything else, it’s a deeply personal statement, and not always in fashion or style.
Case in point, I have seen her over the last few months simulate skiing and hydroplane on various layers of spongy, icy, semi solid waters. More sure–footed than ever before. Her shoe prints go further and deeper in the school park than high-end snow boots prints.
