What to Do With Those Battered Old Baby Shoes? Hide Them in a Wall, of Course

What to do with those battered old baby shoes?

Hide them in a wall, of course.

My church friend Nancy gave me the idea. She’d just read last week’s post, “When the Rough-In Plumbing and Electrical Are Things of Beauty.”  It was an ode to the shiny new bathroom pipes and wires doomed to disappear soon behind slabs of sheetrock.

Nancy wanted me to know that people back east were remodeling nineteenth-century houses and finding shriveled baby shoes inside the walls. She emailed me a link to a story published on the Wisconsin public radio website.

According to the story, hiding a baby shoe in a wall is a tradition that goes back to New England and from there as far back as fourteenth-century Europe: If you hide a baby shoe under a window, it keeps witches, demons, ghosts and other supernatural bad actors from coming inside. Obviously.

It so happens that, for the past week or two, Peter’s baby shoes have been looking at me from their place on a shelf in the guest room where I’ve been hanging out for the duration of the bathroom re-do. They are just one of many, many mementos of my children’s baby times that I haven’t been able to part with.

So when Nancy’s email arrived, I thought, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll hide Peter’s baby shoes in the wall of the new bathroom. I’ll still have them. They’ll be right here with me. But nobody will have to deal with them when that faraway day arrives when I’ve done all the decluttering and deaccessioning I’m ever going to do.

I tied Peter’s scuffed-up baby shoes together and put them on the sill plate under the bathroom window. I’m not a big believer in ghosts or demons, so I thought of Peter’s shoes as a blessing on this house and on anyone who lives here, now and a hundred years from now.

There they were. Peter’s little shoes on the sill plate, forlorn and abandoned and brave in the sawdust.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave them there. Not both of them anyway.

I untied the shoes and left one of them under the window for posterity. I put the other one back on its shelf in the guest room. 

I didn’t want to leave daughter Christina out of this story, so I looked around for her old baby shoes. All I could find was a mismatched pair of hand-knit booties. So, for stories about Christina, you’ll have to go to “Mad Men Exposes the ’60s Girdle.”   Or, “Wait for Me. (Keeping Up With the Twenty-Somethings).”