Appropriately, as summer is ending, so are my favorite wear-everywhere-with-everything black sandals. I’ve loved these sandals for years — perhaps too much love for too long, since my younger daughter cringed everytime I pulled them out. “You look like somebody who wants to be a cowboy,” she’d say. I thought the Western details were cute. But maybe not. The sandals had started to develop an unhealthy sort of rattle in one of the soles and I really didn’t want to investigate to find out what it was. I gradually had begun to swim out of the pool of denial and to think that maybe the end was near. On Labor Day, after tramping around a garden picking okra, it came to me as I was digging out little sticky things and washing off the dirt that I had to say “goodbye.” I was sad. My daughter was ecstatic. And really, when I looked at these shoes with a freshly objective eye, I realized they were so horrible that I was embarrassed to take a photo of them. So just use your imagination. And then double the ugly factor — they were that bad.

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