Once inside the store, the clerk led me to a shelf. On it was a slipper, deep blue in color with the same rounded toe I remembered so well from time spent with my great aunts.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
Memory Slippers
Yesterday my husband said it was time for me to replace my worn-out pair of slippers, the only pair I kept after our move to our new apartment. He went with me into town to find them at the local shoe store that specialized in odd sizes. I have a long, narrow foot—what my aunt Doris used to call ‘wafer’ feet, and I was looking forward to replacing my footwear.
Once inside the store, the clerk led me to a shelf. On it was a slipper, deep blue in color with the same rounded toe I remembered so well from time spent with my great aunts. The top was covered in fabric, the snap replaced with Velcro. The clerk said memory foam would make the slippers easy on my feet. While she went in search of my size, my heart warmed at the memories of those days being with my three great aunts and my grandmother over sixty years ago.
My grandmother and her sisters lived in a large white house in Sussex Corner. It was a stately home where during the last half of the nineteenth century the stage coach from Saint John stopped to trade teams of horses for the long journey to Dorchester, where they changed teams again before heading on toward Halifax. Passengers could also have a hearty meal of pork or beef laced with gravy and surrounded by mounds of mashed potatoes and carrots before heading out over the rough, rutted road.
My story begins many years after the stage coach traveled through Sussex Corner, during the time my great aunts owned the house. There were other stories in the years that followed. Stories about the dirty thirties when people came begging for a meal in exchange for a day’s work, the forties when people pushed back the heavy wood furniture and danced to fiddle music, and the early fifties when soldiers returning from war were still struggling to recover from the experience. The house was a haven for those in distress.
My grandmother and her three sisters were around the same age, all with white hair either in tidy curls, the result of brown paper cut into lengths, woven into their hair at night, or knots of frail hair held in a bun at the back of their neck. They all wore delicate cotton handkerchiefs, trimmed with lace, tucked into the sleeve of their house dress. They never wore pants. That was attire of women with low moral standards in their estimation. In the late nineteen fifties, I was a teenager and in awe of these ladies who smelled of lavender and seemed ancient to me.
The house was a place of wonder for me. The large rooms, brightened by long elegant windows, hinted at past adventures; a place that fed my imagination. There was the huge attic with exposed beams and nails sticking out of the roof boards, the scent of dry wood, mingled with dust, a place that held a broken spinning wheel, abandoned dress forms, hat boxes stacked along the wall, discarded clothing draped over wooden boxes, bits from the past coated in cobwebs.
I was discouraged from going up the rickety steps to the attic that lay hidden behind a tall door in the back bedroom, which meant I never admitted to knowing anything about what was up there. When I was young, my sisters and I called it the white house, until the day we learned from a CBC radio broadcast that The White House was the home of the President of the United States.
I loved to sit in the large kitchen watching them work in unison, each with an essential role in preparing the noon meal, the main meal of the day. There was never a misstep: a truly efficient operation. I was not allowed to help get the food ready, but I was expected to set the large plank table near the windows that looked out on the back garden with its tall cedars and weeping willows.
Hanging out the wash was also a precision operation from slipping the first sheet on the line, fastening it with large wooden clothes pins, to stretching and shaping the dresses with careful pegging so as not to require more ironing than necessary. Electric irons were not to be trusted with the finer things that came in from the clothes line, things like the cotton tablecloths with expertly tatted edges, or their Sunday dresses with their lace collars. The iron they preferred was heated on the back of the wood stove, face down on the black, heated surface. When needed, the flat plate of the iron was spat upon to check the heat level before placing it on the precious article in need of a ‘touch of the iron’.
The women’s underwear, though washed carefully after sewing any small tears, were never hung out on the clothes line. Instead, they were hung on a small line stretched across the alcove at the top of the stairs. Putting underthings on the line for everyone to see was not proper behavior for women of standing, women who knew how to manage a home. My grandmother and great aunts believed in the idiom, ‘don’t air your dirty laundry in public’, a phrase of French origin, but true in both hanging out clothes and in how they lived.
In the evening, from their well-worn, horse-hair chairs, they would sit entertaining people who came by the corner, meaning where the roads joined in front of their house: one road led to downtown Sussex, the other to Picadilly and St. Martins. In good weather people dropped in to chat about the latest goings on in Sussex. In the winter, neighbours coming back from Sussex would stop by to warm themselves at the stove before continuing their long walk back to their homes.
The women sat surrounded by their handwork. My grandmother Ida made quilt pieces during the warmer months in preparation for the long winter evenings when the pieces would be stretched on the quilting frame set up in the parlor. My great aunt Vi knitted mitts, scarves, crocheted doilies, whatever the sisters deemed necessary to keep up the appearance of a home well cared for, and a life lived with civility and dignity. My great aunt Nettie hemmed sheets, repaired towels, her large sewing basket filled to over flowing with useful things that needed repair to make them last. My great aunt Em’s usual job was to hand press the clothing that came in off the line, anything that needed to be folded or smoothed, ready for the iron the next day, or placed in the linen cupboard on the landing upstairs. Being a little less handy than her sisters, it was Em’s job to get the evening cup of tea and cookies ready. A lunch they enjoyed after they finished their work and were ready to go to bed.
I learned early on I was to be seen, not heard. I was to help where I could, fetch anything that was out of their reach, put a single stick of wood in the Enterprise stove and adjust the draft so the wood would burn slowly but steadily. I loved the sound of their voices, the smooth flow of their words never hurried, never loud. Profanity never crossed their lips regardless of the situation. They made tea in a big white enamel pot, starting with the first tea of the morning, after which they added water as the day wore on. The tea at night was strong and well boiled, its sharp scent still so clear to me.
When it came time for bed—which was usually when the solitary lightbulb in the ceiling caused strain to their eyes—they made it clear I was to brush my teeth and go to my bedroom, the only one any of the grandchildren were offered. It was a small room just off the landing at the top of the stairs. My grandmother Ida, crippled after falling down the basement stairs on the farm she and my grandfather worked for over forty years, could not go upstairs with me. She slept in a bedroom behind the kitchen. I wanted to hug her close and tell her how much I loved her, but she was a woman uncomfortable around emotion, and so I simply kissed her cheek, took my glass of water and went up to the bedroom that faced the back garden.
The bedroom was not far from the stairs that led to the attic. Not wanting to think about the attic and the scary things I imagined going on there, I would concentrate on the sounds I could hear out the half-opened window. In the winter the window was closed, but in the warmer months I could listen to the birds settling in the trees, the soft coo of doves, the occasional bark of a dog, and sometimes the sound of a car on the dirt road in front of the house. In the morning, I would go downstairs to find all four sisters up and eating their breakfast of oatmeal with cream and sugar, talking amongst themselves about what they planned to do that day.
They always wore aprons over their house dresses and sturdy shoes that the shoemaker repaired when a sole wore through. They were frugal with everything from what they ate, wore, or purchased, believing in the adage, ‘waste not, want not’.
They wore laced-up shoes, mostly because there wasn’t much else available in New Brunswick in the post-war years. To their way of thinking, buying new from a store, or from a travelling salesman was putting on airs. They were proud of their frugality and their ability to make do.
Unlike other women in the area they had the advantage of my grandmother’s skills as a milliner to provide them with stylish hats and cloth gloves for going to church, or a funeral, or any social event in the neighborhood. My grandmother was always called upon to make hats and gloves for any formal occasion taking place in Sussex. One time she had a request to make a fine feathered hat for a Mrs. Emmerson from Saint John who was taking a cruise liner to London. There was much talk about that, as people in Saint John seldom sought the expertise of people in Sussex, seeing the people there as being from the country, therefore less sophisticated. Saint John, the only city in New Brunswick at the time, was a much larger place that provided better shopping, and many services not available elsewhere in the province.
Then one day my aunt Hazel arrived from Sackville and brought my grandmother a pair of ‘store bought’ slippers. They had rounded toes, beautiful paisley-patterned material that appeared to be upholstery fabric. They looked like a low shoe, unlike what the sisters normally wore, and they were sturdy yet soft. For them, slippers were sewed from felt cloth, and used to slide your foot into when getting out of bed on a cold morning. They had little shape and not much use outside the bedroom.
But these slippers, with their flap of fabric that crossed over the top of the foot and fastened with a hook, were something very new. At first my grandmother didn’t say much, but when she took off her shoes and slipped them on, she smiled at my aunt.
Relieved that the slippers might have found acceptance in the house, my aunt explained that the slippers were really meant to be worn in the evening when they did their handwork. The slippers would be a comfortable reprieve from the stiff leather lace-up shoe they wore all day. After looking over my grandmother’s pair, the sisters agreed there was a certain style to them, even though they weren’t quite sure they were the right thing to wear.
But my aunt persisted, and eventually all four of them had a new pair of these slippers. They wore them for the rest of their lives, mending and cleaning them as needed, always mentioning to anyone within earshot how they weren’t sure in the beginning, but they thought it only right to accept the gift from my aunt.
They were delighted to discover that they could replace the sole with felt cloth, something they wanted to do because if these slippers were to be worn they’d have to last a long time.
Why, after all these years, am I reminded of that time in my life? I’m sure part of it is my age. I find myself remembering events from my childhood, and pondering the massive changes I have lived through since the mid-forties when I was born. But mostly I am at ease remembering what went on in the lives of these resourceful, remarkable women I had the honor to love and learn from.
What would my grandmother Ida, great aunt Em, Vi and Nettie think of me being able to buy today, more than sixty years later, a very similar slipper to the one they’d been given years ago? I can hear their voices down the ages with the admonition that there’d be no shoemaker to fix them when they wore out.
If only these slippers could take me back to the time I shared with them, to once again listen in to their talk about people in their lives. If I could go back I would happily fetch things for them when needed, stoke the wood stove, and pull the tea pot to the front of the stove to heat it up for their evening lunch.
And maybe, just maybe hear them talk about how they could mend my slippers when they wore out, put new felt on the bottoms of them. I think they would have been pleased with my new slippers.
Ruth Stella MacLean has spent her life telling stories, whether to her dolls, her friends or becoming a published fiction author. She served as Writer in Residence at Vancouver Public Library in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a Board Member (Treasurer) of Romance Writers of America, and as a member of the Board of the Moncton Public Library. She is a member of the New Brunswick Writers Federation where she has been a winner on several occasions for her short stories: Monday Morning Rain or Shine and Never Again. She is part of anthology published this year by Askew’s Word on the Lake: A Search for Certainty. Her story included in the anthology is Look a Little Closer. She is a retired registered nurse, with a Degree in Commerce (Accounting) from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, having qualified as a CPA and as a C.H.E during her career.