Day 23: Boots, Notebooks and Witch Shoes Etc.

There is a storeroom under the house. It's not quite a crawlspace, but it has got a dirt floor and some vents open to the outside. My father built a shelf upon which I stored a bunch of boxes of old books, and it seems every time I came for an extended visit, my mother would pack things I left behind into a box and stick it in the storeroom. I have been going through all these boxes, some of which are time capsules from various years.

I have a good collection of blank notebooks, partly because ones I know that I have purchased seem to have gone missing. I found a couple dozen, in pristine condition, in this box, which my mother packed and labeled around ten years ago. But what in the world are witch shoes?

Oh! These were once my favorite boots, EVER!

 

Here I am wearing them, in 1992:

However, the downstairs of the house developed a quite bad damp problem in the 1990s. Since then I have had to use moisture collectors in the closet of my room, and one of these contraptions became so overly full of water that it spilled onto the floor of the closet, soaking these (very soft leather) boots. Tragedy!

 They curled up just like the Wicked Witch of the East's feet!

I could not bear to throw them away as I thought there must be a way to salvage them.

I tried to clean them with some kind of leather nourisher to no avail...

I guess now it's time to say farewell.













 In the meantime I opened another box which my mom had stuck in a different part of the storage room - a damp part - around the same time.

Those were three of my favorite pairs of footwear! The silver Mary Janes on the left and the black Chelsea boots on the right I barely got a chance to wear before they disappeared. (I got both pairs here in LA around the time that they halved the amount of luggage you were allowed to take abroad; hence I had left them here!)

However, the lace-up boots in the middle had a good long run. I bought them in the spring of 1985 at Hobbs in London and wore them constantly for more than twenty years. They were completely caked with mud in Glastonbury in 1987, though they scrubbed up well afterward. I did not attempt to save any of these shoes though; just took these photos and said goodbye.