BIRTHDAY SHOES...

"Life is the dancer, and you are the dance..." -Eckhart Tolle

April meant new shoes. For me. When I was little. Spring shoes to stomp in . Mud to muck about in. My mother often took me to the one shoe store in town. The one that had been open for at least a century.   

My mother always bought  me a pair of shiny part shoes. Supposed to be for spring  recitals. 

 They  weren’t stomp worthy.I would pout and  pretend they didn’t fit by squirming and hanging from the bench. No such luck.Year after long year, it was always the same recital shoes.

Then one spring, when I was much older, before the store closed for  good, we went by the shop one last time. A pair of  gold slipper shoes caught my mother’s eyes.   They glittered. 

My ever practical  mother picked them up. “We used to go dancing. I had shoes like these…long ago.” She tried them on. For fun. We left without buying anything.

    I returned to the store,  just before her birthday,  and bought the last pair of gold dancing slippers. I wrapped the shoe box in newsprint with a gold bow. Her birthday was the next day. The fifth of April. When I was little I used to make her toilet paper roll dolls and tissue flowers.  

April 5^th dawned. We were planning on heading out  to get manure and dirt. I gave her the present.  My mother carefully took off the gold bow,  unwrapped the newsprint, folding it neatly and laying to one side. 

Then she stared inside. She often was hard to read, but  dutifully slipped them on. Then she walked purposefully up and down our main hall. Back and forth.

The shoes squeaked. Dreadfully. Squeak. Squeak. 

My mother laughed. Then she snorted. Most unladylike. Then I laughed.

She was wearing her  train engineer overalls. One of  her favourite things to wear. So she decided to wear the gold slippers. 

We drove to the gardening store. She took off the right  slipper to drive, of course, and the glitter  shone like gold.  She wore them in the garden store when she bought  manure and dirt. 

Squeak.Squeak. She wore them in the grocery store after that. With her overalls . Squeak.Squeak. We ran into a couple of her friends. Squeak. Squeak.“My birthday present,” said my mother, showing off her shoes.

When we got home, she switched to rubber boots to dig up the ground to plant sweet peas. Another one of her  favourite things to do on her birthday. She was a hard worker, and  she toiled away till the last sweet pea seed was planted. Then it was  evening. She had made  a Caraway Seed cake. I stuck a candle in the loaf.My mother sat  in her train engineer overalls and glittery shoes. “We would go dancing on my birthday. At the Crystal gardens.”

 My mother put on a  record (yes, a record)and had me dance with her that night. She often would put on an old record from time to time, and dance. This time she asked me to join in. Any other time I would say I felt silly. But that fifth of April, I did not.

                     

She hummed a tuneless melody. She never could carry a tune. But she loved music. The gold slippers sparkled, and squeaked, as we danced around the living room , her in her engineer overalls.I imagined her in a sweeping ballgown, waltzing across the floor. And the gold slippers squeaked on. It was probably the last time I saw her dance. I left for school in  the next year.

But on that evening she  told me stories about dancing with my father, and of glittery, squeaky shoes  and birthdays long ago. Beautiful things. So many years before…….

Photographs 2022