It’s always the small things you remember.
About six months ago, one of my clients stepped out of her car for a shoot, and I heard a familiar jingle. At first, I could not place the sound, but after just a second, I realized that it was coming from her shoes. Once I glanced down, I saw her wearing a shoe that almost made me cry. They were a sandal with tiny little glass leaves and grapes that jingled when she walked, and all of these memories of my mother came flooding back to me. Mother had been a shoe person if ever there was one, and she had a pair of white sandals with red and purple grapes that surely had been made by the same designer nearly 35 years prior!
My client asked me to tell her the story as I stood there and kept saying “Oh my, oh my!” I explained to her that after mother had been killed, my father gave many of her clothes and shoes away. He was like most men not thinking about a day in the future when I would want to wear these things or might enjoy just having them. In his haste to try to painfully move on, it was understandable that he gift to her closest friends who were the same size all of these “things.” Years later, I recall, perhaps in high school specifically asking him for those white sandals. I remembered them from when I was a little girl and wanted very much to have them. I was crushed to find that they had been given away.
There’s a lot about losing a mother at an early age that is difficult to describe or for others to understand, but in a nutshell, it’s always the small things you remember. It might be a sound or a smell. For me, it was the clicking of those shoes, and I felt like I had found something of mother that had been lost to me. My client immediately pulled her foot out of the shoe, and asked me to try it on, and it fit as we are the same size. I told her that I could not take them but asked her for the manufacturer, and said if she ever found anything similar to please buy a pair for me. Two months later, she texted me that she had returned to Switzerland and had been searching for the shoes for me only to discover they were nowhere to be found! I could hardly believe that she would have gone to so much trouble! She said at the next shoot she was bringing hers to me, and I told her absolutely not. I did not intend to have her give up her gloriously fab shoes for me! She wasn’t listening to any of it.
When she brought me the baby for the next visit, she brought me those shoes. I told her how much she means to me and that thanking her would never quite be enough. It was a selfless gesture on her part marking her and my friendship forever. She simply stated that for her it was a “no brainer – those shoes had been mine all along – she had just been the one to find and get them!”
Happy New Year, too by the way. This year, I am asking everyone to look around them and see if they have something ever so small that might be just the perfect gift to a stranger or to a loved one. I never thought I would ever see those shoes again, and now, I have found the most perfect treasure in the most unexpected of ways!
