When I was about seven months pregnant this summer, a bunch of the women in my family went shoe shopping at one of our favorite stores, Nordstrom Rack. If you’ve never been to the Rack, you have spared yourselves a marathon day of searching for that perfect something, but you have also lost out on an always fun shopping trip. It is where all the local Nordie items that were deemed unworthy by the wealthy are deemed fit for us poor people to desperately paw through.
Anhyhoo, I couldn’t really do any clothes shopping, so of course I went directly to the shoes. Oh, the shoes. Racks and racks of shoes, some of them obviously deserving of a place on the clearance table, others not so much. I almost always find a pair that I’m willing to buy, it just depends on the budget at the time if they will actually accompany me home.
As I was perusing the aisles, my eyes spied what looked to be very cute loafers. I’m a sucker for loafers. At places like this, you have to be very quick, because there is always some chick shadowing you and trying to invade your rightful personal space (and shoe picks) so I grabbed them and put them in my basket. My M.O. is to collect all the promising looking shoes into my personal possession and away from the shifty-eyed bitch to the left of me, and then take a look at them all when my basket is full.
Well, when I got to this particular pair of loafers, I saw immediately that I loved them. They were sort of spectator-ish and looked to be made of linen, which I thought was really interesting. Then I looked at the label. They were from Taryn Rose. Oh my! And the price? Only eighty bucks, which if you know anything about Taryn Rose shoes, that is an absolute steal.
So I tried them on, and noticed that there was a very tiny black mark on the left heel. Aha, that explained the discounting. I was willing to overlook the mark, it was toward the inside and I didn’t think anyone would be looking that closely at my feet as I was walking. I mean, you never know, but I was willing to take the chance. It wasn’t an egregious mark, and hey, I could always blame it on my kids and no one would think twice.
When I modeled them for my family, they loved the shoes, but a few of them had puckered brows as they looked down at my pregnant feet. It seemed that my swollen-ish feet were stretching the linen on the top of the shoe in an ugly way. An ugly way that meant the shoes weren’t worth buying.
But wait, the swollen feet were a temporary condition, I exclaimed. I can still triumphantly purchase these lovely, comfortable shoes!
However, I was counseled against buying them since I couldn’t be absolutely sure if the stretching was a part of the shoe, or if it was my feet, or any other number of uncontrollable factors. I wept, but they were right. I didn’t want to spend eighty bucks just to have them sit in my closet forever.
So maybe I’m just in denial and I have fat feet, but I’d like to think that if only I hadn’t been pregnant when I tried those shoes on, I would in fact be wearing them right now.
What was your pair of shoes that got away?
