For as long as I can remember, I have had a hard time finding shoes that fit me. When I was a young girl, my mother would take me to a shoe store and pick out some shoes, have the salesman put them on my feet and then we would go over to a little X-ray machine and the salesman would tell me to put my feet in the machine and he would look at a screen in the machine to see if the shoes fit my feet or not. What they were mostly interested in was toe room at the time. The concept was a good one, except for the radiation exposure that was later determined to be a bad thing. There was always room for my toes in my shoes. The problem that I had, though, was that the shoes were always too narrow and always rubbed a blister on the back of my heels.

So when I would buy a new pair of shoes, I would do everything in my power to break down the back part of the shoes, to make them softer, to give my poor feet a break. There were very few shoes that I really felt comfortable in, and I would wear them forever and a day! I can remember when I first moved to Maine and I went to the LLBean store in Freeport to try to buy a pair of ladies boots for the winter and the clerk could not find any ladies boots that would fit me. If the foot part fit then the calf was too slender. Finally the clerk announced that the only boots that she would be able to sell me that would fit me would be a pair of boy’s winter boots. And she brought them out for me to try on; they were a perfect fit and I wore them every day of every winter for the next ten years! When the sole wore out I returned them to the store and they put new soles on the boots for me and I then gave them to my son to wear for a couple of winters before he outgrew them and then I wore them again. It truly has been that hard for me to find boots!

Fortunately, I have had better luck finding ladies sandals to fit me, but because I have to wear compression hosiery every day I stick to gladiator style sandals. Having something between my toes like flip flops just have not worked for me at all. And unfortunately the compression hosiery I have to wear have reinforced toes and heels so that when I wear the sandals the reinforced parts show a lot and I think that it looks very ugly. So I tend to gravitate towards the “fisherman” style sandal that has closed toe and heel but straps on the side. At least I don’t have to worry about wide calves with sandals!