Green Suede Boots

They are showing women's boots in all the lighted shop windows that I pass on my way home from work. No, that is inaccurate, excuse me. For all my adult life, on winter evenings, lighted display windows with women's boots for sale are the only shop windows that attract my notice.

Some of the pairs of boots in those windows I would like to buy. The high-heeled ones with exaggerated, long, pointy toes suitable for pushing off the ground while astride one's broomstick I would not buy. Ditto for platforms. But the flat-heeled ones with snub toes such as self-confident college girls in my day wore? Mmm. This year, they are also showing boots trimmed with shaggy fake fur. Maybe this is supposed to suggest cave women, and although I can recognize the element of kitsch there, also Mmmm.

Now, look, I don't have a shoe fetish or own, like some notorious dictators' notorious wives, closets full of shoes. I own a pair of sandals, two pair of dirty sneakers, a pair of black pumps, and a pair of comfortable black boots that cost about twelve dollars when I bought them a few years ago, but because they are imitation leather and do not breathe, stink on the inside. I also own a pair of real leather boots of a pearly gray shade embroidered with thick, bronze-colored thread, but these apparently were a bad investment as their stacked heel has proved too high and turns my normally flowing stride into an off-kilter, Tiggerish bounce.

In the past millennium, for fifteen consecutive years, I owned two pair of soft Italian leather boots, one pair the color of dark chocolate and the other pair a creamy caramel hue. I was used to pulling one or the other pair off and tossing them in the corner of the hall as I entered the house and went upstairs (I was mistress of a big house then with an upstairs and a downstairs). I actually liked to see those darling boots carelessly flung in their corner all soft and crumpled and familiar with wear. One day, though, our new puppy ate them. I came downstairs from my nap to find shredded strips of leather beside intact heels and soles, and the beautiful puppy, with her floppy ears and round puppy face, curled up sated and asleep on her blanket. She had thought they were chew toys. And rightly so. It is doggie psychology to think that anything on the floor belongs to the dog. Besides, those boots' matte leather had become so supple and buffed with time and good care that you really could understand how someone would want to eat them.

When I was a little girl, low-heeled, mid-calf boots of radiant white matte leather were the fashion. The leather did not slump when you took them off; those boots could stand up on their own. Go-go boots I believe they were called in the corny lingo of the times, but I am not sure. Love would not be too strong a word for how I felt about the pair I owned. Now, of course, I would only go as far as affection because love is for channeling into children and dogs and women friends and, if one could get past the fear of men's bullying, into men.

Unlike the rest of us, one of our classmates owned a pair of jade-green suede boots. Although they were the same exact style as everyone else's boots, the color and texture made all the difference. I never saw anything like them displayed in the store windows of our neighborhood. It never occurred to me at the time that this girl must have had a remarkable mother with access to a world unlike, and well beyond, the suburbs in order to give her daughter a pair of boots like that.

My classmate wore those boots day in and day out for the entire last two years of primary school, fall and winter and spring, until they had acquired the peculiarly beautiful sheen of slightly soiled suede or buckskin. She was not among my friends and, as I recall, we had no particular reason ever to converse. Nevertheless, I remember that girl's name and face vividly because not a school day of those two years went by when I did not wait for the bell that released us to the playground so that I might secretly admire her green suede boots.

It occurs to me as I write this that in a casual way, I have remained on the lookout for a pair of green suede boots like those owned by my childhood classmate. If ever I were to glimpse on display in a lighted store window boots like hers, I would go in and purchase them. Even if, by then, I am a hundred. Even if I am no longer showing my kneecaps to the world. And when I pull those boots on, even if by then I am a hundred, I will feel beautiful.