W is for Whoops!

 

I am in the process of sorting through everything in my parents' home, and in so doing, I have been looking through all my childhood memorabilia, the majority of which I hadn't seen since my parents packed up my belongings and moved them from the home I grew up in to this house some 45 years ago. My 2024 A to Z Challenge theme is based on the treasures I have found in the boxes and the drawers and closets. Join me on my bittersweet journey back to my childhood.

Some of the treasures I've been writing about finding at my parents' house are not necessarily from my childhood, but they've been in a closet for a good long time, like the quilt block my mom started and never finished. I think they qualify for this theme, and my blog, my rules, so there you go.

A shoebox has sat on the top shelf of a closet at my parents' house that has not been touched since it was put there over 30 years ago. I know it has been over 30 years, because when I removed the lid, expecting to find an assortment of odds and ends, I instead found my wedding shoes.

I loved my wedding shoes! They went well with the style of my wedding dress, had just enough of a heel to keep me from walking like a duck but not so much as to make me taller than my husband (tall girl problems), and while not exactly comfortable, they weren't murderous to my feet. 

I bought my dress in Nashville, where I lived, but I didn't get the shoes until just a couple of weeks before the wedding, and I bought them with my mom at a bridal store on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. It was the most money I had ever spent on a pair of shoes in my entire life.

Look what was in the shoe box!

Obviously, there hasn't been a big demand for me to wear these shoes, since they are very obviously wedding shoes and I've only worn a wedding gown the one time. The taps on the heels have deteriorated, the bows are wonky because of being in a box for over 30 years, and there is discoloration on them, so letting them go to the landfill wasn't a hard decision to make, but I got a last laugh when I turned them over and saw something I had completely forgotten about:

Oops

It's a good thing that kneeling at the altar wasn't a thing in my wedding, or the entire congregation would have gotten a chuckle out of the writing on the bottoms of my shoes, as well as the price tag that I never took off.* 

Here's a photo from my wedding that shows the toes of the shoes peeping out from under my dress. Our photographer snapped this candid when I was adjusting the falsies that were trying to escape from where I had stuck them in my bra in a futile attempt to fill out the top of the dress, if you know what I mean. And no, it never occurred to me that I could have had the dress altered, since the rest of the dress fit me perfectly. And also no, I did not have nearly enough stuffing in my bra to make a difference, such was the discrepancy between me and the bust size that dress was capable of enveloping.

Only four of us were aware of my wardrobe malfunction; me, my mom, my husband,
and the photographer, who may or may not have been drunk

Side note: I also found my wedding dress (or what I THINK is my wedding dress) in a very large box and buried deep within a closet that always harbored brown recluse spiders and a lot of my junk. I never saw it again after I took it off the day of my wedding. My mom took it to a dry cleaners to be cleaned and "preserved." I'd like to look at it, but it's purportedly sealed in this box and I'm afraid of opening the box and finding out (a) that the fabric will immediately yellow and deteriorate when exposed to the air and/or (b) it's not even my dress in there but some other random person's, and because it was presented to my mom sealed inside the box, she would have had no way to check and see.

*I have always been cavalier about removing price tags, and my mother used to call me Minnie Pearl because of it.