Supple navy blue leather, rounded toe, two-inch heels, jaunty little notched cutout at the top of the foot. Fashionable 1940’s women’s pumps, which somehow made their way across an ocean from post-war Germany to our humble Canadian home. I wobbled around in them precariously as a little girl.
I adored those shoes. For one thing, they had heels, which my mother never wore during her domestic duties or her work as a cleaning woman. The only high heels I ever saw adorned the feet of screen stars on our black and white TV. .
Those wonderful blue pumps were soft, sleek, well-shaped and the opposite of how I saw my mother: a dowdy mining-town housewife. They lived incongruously on a back porch shoe rack. During our short, precious summers, the kitchen door would gleefully stand open to the uninsulated porch, frozen and forbidden during winter, where I played little girl play. I would slide my little feet into those strange, beautiful creations and pretend I was older; pretend I was someone important.
The shoes exuded memories of a time when my mom had been young, when she had been beautiful. A time when she danced with British soldiers in a displaced person’s (DP) camp after the war. A time when life unfolded ahead of her, full of hope and freedom. Probably the best time of her life. I could see it in her eyes when she’d hear a song from that era or watch an elegant couple whirling around a dance floor on TV. Post-war Germany, remarkably, seemed to have been a very happy place for her. The DP camp meant escape to a better life, a better world.
I loved to hobble around in those sumptuous works of art, admiring my little feet in ladylike attire. I never saw my mother wear them and wondered why she kept them all those years. Was she hoping my dad might take her out somewhere, someday? Doubtful. Immigrants worked, survived, raised their children. Life was too serious for trivialities.
Maybe spotting those shoes was a touchstone for her, a small celebration of her most carefree moments surrounded by girlfriends, all dreaming of a new land. A land where there was sugar and coffee and no one shooting at them, no bombs going off, no family members being slaughtered. A land where, someday, she would get married and have the children she so craved, creating a home for all of them.
And she achieved her dream. She raised her children and we had a safe home: small by today’s standards but always with food on the table, thanks to my dad’s refinery wages and my mom’s abundant garden. I can’t even imagine the horrors of war they experienced, the loss, the devastation, as they never spoke of it. But I am eternally grateful they made their heroic journeys and ended up here.
A dreaming daughter, mesmerized by incongruous blue shoes, has never forgotten.
Lena Samson is a writer and editor living outside Ottawa, Canada. Her poems and stories have been published in various journals and anthologies.