Keeper of Story

Victorian Wedding Boots

Sometimes in places like flea markets, thrift stores, and museums, I discover things that are so full of story, I want to stand still, barely breathe, and let my heart do the hearing. Such was the case with these soft, lace-tangled boots with linings the color of sea shells.

Other things beckoned that day in the hushed little museum: jet beaded collars that trailed over bone-thin shoulders; an old book open to a love-lost poem; the steep ladder-like stairs that twisted to the crooked landing above; a Victorian hair wreath tangled around delicate wire and housed in a golden shadowbox.

But that afternoon, it was these boots.

I listened. They told me they were worn only once on a wedding day in mid-April when the forsythia had just blossomed and the daffodils were tossed in the gray winds off the leaden sea. An afternoon parlor wedding with the piercing eyes of the bride’s grandparents looking on from their oval picture frames and quite possibly wondering what in the world their granddaughter was doing, marrying a sailor! Handsome, yes. Young, yes. But what were his prospects?

He owned no land, no house, nothing really, but his wild sense of adventure and the scope of imagination that went with it. Rather their granddaughter, wearing these soft boots and her best dress, be wed to the widower farmer who lived nearby and often brought the family apples and bushels of corn, fresh eggs, and bottles of sour dandelion wine.

The beautiful boots were a gift from the bride’s elderly aunt, who never married but believed in love all the same. And her young niece wore them that chilly spring day and looked at her handsome husband, knowing he was leaving for a long voyage on the dangerous and yearning seas, leaving in three days. Looked at him and saw only his vitality, his comeliness, his grace.

Year later, gently folding back the yellowed muslin, she unwrapped these boots and it all came back: the faded parlor, the slate skies and the fierce wind, the forsythia through the watery windows. His face. Her heart. The boots, holding the story, keeping it still and close.