Shoes in the Garden

It’s Wednesday again, which means I rushed home, grabbed my camera, and got some shoe shots for you. In the column to the right of this post, I’m going to set up a little poll to see if you’re beginning to find My Shoes Wednesday a bit old, or if you’d like to see how much longer I can keep finding shoes in the back of my closet. (And if you do like the feature and want to see some older posts, I’ve got a set of links in the column on the right.) Meanwhile, I do have another pair that I love, especially since the heeled oxford seems to be a big hit this fall and my pair are 5 or 6 years old! I’d buy them again tomorrow if I saw them, but I’ve already had years since I first spotted them in a shop window in one of those twisty little streets in Quebec City. We were fortunate enough to be staying up the hill in the Chateau Frontenac where Paul was at a meeting, so I made a mental map so as to be able to find the store again (with more success than when I tried to get back to a certain shoe store in Paris), and I went back the next day to try them on. They had my size, I put them on and loved them, and we’ve been together ever since. Check out the cool stitching — they remind me of the leatherwork that was so popular in the late 60s/early 70s. And you can’t see clearly here, but where the horizontal pieces overlap (with the daisies in their centre), they leave little cut-outs where the foot peeps through.

I probably should have gotten in a bit closer for you to see the detail of the heels — they’re stacked for a classic but funky look, in my opinion. And see how they just want to walk — They’re by a company called Joe Sanchez and inside they say “Keep on Walking.” I’m not going to claim they’re wonderfully comfortable — you’d look at the heel and know I’d be lying — but they’re not bad at all. Above all, even if these shoes are out walking in the garden, they are truly a fall shoe, and wearing them this week meant I was really acknowledging the season. In fact, I’m almost ready to embrace it, not just acknowledge it. After all, look at some of these colours:

A miscanthus in its full autumn glorySedum spectabile ‘Autumn splendour’ — I’ve been waiting years for mine to finally put on a good show — this year they’re making me very happy — that’s the gentian sage providing the spark of blue in the lower left.

And another plant that’s finally hit that maturity point where it’s beginning to do what I hoped. Parthenocissus tricuspidata, aka Boston ivy, but I’m not sure which one, and haven’t got the time right now to look it up — sorry! It’s just beginning to turn and I hope it will flame red all the way up that trunk