Wooden Shoes

The story of the wooden shoes

When I was 19 years old I had 2 little ones, 1 a baby the other a toddler. We lived with my husband at the time in the bedroom I grew up in as a child but I was trying to gather the furniture together so we could move out.

This process began when the lady who lived on the corner down the road from us had a yard sale. I bought a microwave and 4 beautiful kitchen chairs from her and put them underneath the covered parking outside of my parents house and covered them with a tarp.

I found a table at Wal-Mart and put it on layaway then kept my eyes open for other bits of furniture to add to my collection. The neighbors across the street moved away leaving a beautiful couch and love seat. The only problem with the couch was a big tear down the fabric in the back. So I got out a sewing needle and spent hours sewing it up. I got the table out of layaway and we were ready to get an apartment.

There was a place not too far from my parents which had 2 bedrooms, a bathroom/laundry room, a small kitchen, tiny dining room and living room. The furniture seemed sparse when we first moved in, we didn't have a side table yet in the living room so I grabbed a wooden crate and turned it on it's side and put a cloth over the top. I found a couple of little beds for the babies and put them in their room and set up my childhood furniture in our room.

We were lacking a few things, like a washer and dryer, so I made a list of everything we needed and a few things that I wanted as well. One of those things was wooden shoes, clogs had become fashionable at the time but I didn't have money for such things so they were just a wish.

I didn't see how we were going to get any of the things on the list because we didn't have much money, barely enough to pay the rent sometimes. We were getting Bishops orders for food, or going to the food bank. For clothing I would sew little pants or shorts for the kids and find things at yard sales. Sometimes I thought about how we didn't even have spare change in the couch cushions.

I kept a look out for opportunities and one day my Uncle Mo called me up and invited us to come look through the stuff he had in his basement. Basements in general had been scary to me as a kid but my Uncle Mo's basement had been especially scary.

He had a room that he'd converted into a bar with red carpet and animal heads hanging on the wall.