There may be nothing quite as personal as an old pair of shoes.
A dress tells us something about the person who wore it. But shoes carry the evidence of the person herself. They take the shape of her feet. Their soles record the fact that she stood in them, walked in them, went somewhere in them.
These belonged to Laura Martin Hartwell.
I introduced Laura recently through an extraordinary beaded silk chiffon dress that had remained in her family for a century. It has now sold as part of my Vintage for Spokane wildfire fundraiser and is on its way to a new home.
But the dress wasn't all that survived from Laura's 1920s wardrobe.
There were these shoes.
They are tiny—marked 4 1/2 B—and almost impossibly lovely: golden-bronze floral brocade trimmed in silver leather, with slender ankle straps, tiny mother-of-pearl buttons and silver-covered heels.
For shoes approaching a century old, their condition is remarkable. The brocade is beautiful. The silver still gleams. Even the delicate straps have survived.
And then you turn them over.
The soles are worn.
Not ruined, not heavily damaged. Just worn enough to remind us that these weren't beautiful objects sitting untouched in a box.
Laura went somewhere in them.
Where?
I wish I knew.
Laura was born in 1879, so she was already in her forties during the 1920s. She wasn't the young flapper who has come to represent the decade in our imagination. She was a grown woman—a wife and mother—wearing a blush silk dress covered with beads and rhinestones, and slipping her feet into silver heels when she went out.
Did she wear these with the beaded dress? They survived together, but I can't know. Did she dance in them? I can't know that either.
But I do know that she wore them.
And perhaps that's enough.
There is something profoundly moving to me about standing, figuratively, in the footsteps of the women who came before us. Their lives weren't lived in black and white. They weren't merely names in newspapers, dates in genealogies, or—as I discovered while looking for a photograph of Laura—names carved on gravestones.
They chose beautiful things. They got dressed. They went places.
Laura eventually made her home on West 13th Avenue in Spokane. Her shoes remained in her family through the generations, eventually coming to me through my dear friend Linda.
Now, almost a century after Laura wore them, they are going somewhere again.
I'm offering them at auction as part of Vintage for Spokane: From Spokane, For Spokane, with 100% of the proceeds benefiting SpokAnimal's work helping animals and families affected by the wildfires.
I can't tell you where Laura walked in these shoes.
But I know where they're going now: to help the city she called home.