A letter from a reader

My 19-year-old granddaughter tried to walk out of my house in my shoes

She got as far as the porch steps before I noticed.

My granddaughter was home from college for fall break, and she had her bag on her shoulder and her car keys in her hand, and on her feet were my shoes. The brown ones. She had rolled her jeans up two turns so you could see them.

When I called after her she did not even look guilty. She turned around on the step and said:

Grandma, everyone at school wants Mary Janes. Can I just borrow these until Sunday?

I have to tell you how funny that was to me, because for about fifteen years nobody under the age of sixty would have been caught dead in anything on my shoe rack.

There were two kinds of shoes in my house. Plain black ballet slippers, the slip-on kind with nothing holding them on, that I had to grip with my toes to keep from sliding off at the heel. And beige "comfort" shoes with thick soles and a velcro tab, the kind that look like they came with a prescription.

I did not choose either of them, not really. I chose between them, every morning, for fifteen years.

How a shoe rack gets like that

Somewhere around sixty, the shoe store splits into two aisles. One aisle is pretty things cut for women half our age. The other is beige, padded and sensible, and nobody is ever going to ask you where you got them.

So you compromise. You buy the pretty slip-ons and pay for it by lunchtime, or you buy the sensible ones and tuck your feet under the table when your daughter's friends come over.

And because it is only shoes, you never quite deal with it. You just stop looking at your own feet.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong. I thought comfort came from padding. Thicker soles, softer insoles, wider everything. So the more comfortable a shoe was, the more it had to look like a medical device.

It turns out a lot of my problem was much simpler than that. My old slip-ons had nothing holding them on, so my toes were doing the holding, all day, and I did not notice I was clenching until I took them off at night.

A strap across the instep does that job instead. That is the whole idea of a Mary Jane, and little girls have run around the playground in them for a hundred years for exactly that reason. I just never thought of it as something for me. That took me until 64 to find out.

Mine is the Hilma

They are from Wentworth & Rowe, a small family shop on King Street in Charleston, South Carolina. Margaret Rowe has run it since 1998, and I first walked in on a trip down there years ago. This fall is the first time they have sold online.

Mine is the Hilma, in brown. It is a brogue with a Mary Jane strap: a full wingtip with all the little punched holes along the toe, a T-bar that comes up the front of the foot and buckles across it with a small silver buckle, and a low, chunky stacked sole.

The brown is burnished, darker at the toe and the heel and lighter across the top, so they look like a pair you have loved for years even on the first day. The toe is rounded, so my toes lie flat instead of being pinched to a point.

What happened when I wore them

The day they came I took them out of the mailer, put them on, and wore them to the library book sale. Then I walked the Labrador around the green. I did not think about my feet once, which I realized that evening I had not been able to say in years.

I wore them with turned-up jeans and a sweater on a Saturday and felt, for want of a better word, current. Not dressed young. Just not dressed like I had given up.

And then my granddaughter came home and tried to leave with them, which I am choosing to take as the highest compliment a 19-year-old can pay.

Three things I have learned since

One. My toes stopped working so hard. With the T-bar buckled, the shoe stays on my foot by itself. I can walk down the church steps without that little grip at every step.

Two. A low, steady sole beats a high, padded one. The stacked sole is chunky and close to the ground, so I feel steady on the old brick sidewalks downtown without feeling like I am wearing platforms.

Three. They look better the more I wear them. The burnished finish already has that lived-in shading at the toe and heel, so a scuff from the garden path just looks like part of the shoe.

They make eleven styles of Mary Jane, and the button below shows you all of them. Mine is the first one. I have my eye on two more.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Hilma is $94.95. It was $316.95.

The reason is a happy one. This is their first fall selling online after twenty-eight years on King Street, and they are marking it with a sale. When I worked out what I had spent on shoes I either gripped or hid over the last fifteen years, it did not take long to decide.

They come in brown or black, in US sizes 4 to 11 with half sizes. Shipping is free, and you have thirty days to send them back if they are not right. I read all of that before I ordered, the way I imagine you are reading it now.

Then I ordered my granddaughter her own pair, in black. She is getting them at Thanksgiving. If you are reading this, sweetheart, act surprised.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If we were having coffee at my kitchen table and you asked, this is what I would tell you.

Look at the shoes by your own back door. If they are the kind you have to hang on to with your toes, or the kind you would rather nobody looked at, you do not have to keep choosing between the two. A strap across the top of the foot does more than any amount of padding ever did for me.

Two practical things. The First Fall sale is on now, and the most popular sizes go first. And there are eleven styles, so if the Hilma is not quite you, one of the others will be.

The beige ones went to the church rummage sale. I have not missed them for a single day.

Susan