Why the Hell Is There a Shoe in the Wall?

Let’s say you’re remodeling an old house. Not because there’s anything particularly wrong with it, but because at some point you stood in the kitchen, looked at the cabinets and decided you could no longer live another day with whatever shade of brown someone chose in 1987. This is how these things begin. Three weeks later half the kitchen is missing, you’ve spent twice what you planned, there’s a microwave sitting on a folding table in the living room, and you’ve discovered that at least one previous homeowner believed electrical codes were merely suggestions.

Then somebody opens a section of wall near the fireplace and finds a shoe.

Not a pair, which might suggest some understandable storage decision. One shoe. Old, filthy, worn nearly through the sole and sitting inside the wall where absolutely no shoe should be. Naturally everybody stops working because demolition has suddenly become interesting. Somebody suggests a worker dropped it during construction, which sounds reasonable until you notice that it isn’t wedged somewhere accidentally.

Somebody put it there.

And depending on the construction crew standing in your kitchen, things may get interesting right about now.

People who spend their lives tearing into old houses have opened walls the rest of us haven’t. They’ve crawled through attics and basements nobody has entered for decades. They’ve found photographs, religious objects, bottles, charms, children’s things, bones and God knows what else tucked into places where somebody very deliberately put them.

Some workers will laugh it off. Others absolutely will not.

Find something interesting enough and you may suddenly have a contractor who was perfectly willing to deal with mold, ancient wiring and a foundation held together by prayer, but has now decided your project falls outside the scope of his license.

Personally, I wouldn’t blame him.

Because I’m taking a picture of that shoe and immediately researching it, and that’s when things get even stranger.

People really have found old shoes deliberately concealed inside buildings. They’ve turned up behind walls, beneath floors, inside chimneys, around fireplaces and near doors, and some have been sitting there for hundreds of years. Historians don’t know exactly what every shoe meant, but many of these finds have been associated with old folk practices involving protection, luck and guarding vulnerable places in the home.

And I happen to believe there may be something to that.

You don’t have to.

Maybe Margaret put her old shoe near the fireplace because she’d been taught that it protected the house, and the protection existed entirely in her mind. Maybe the practice simply made people feel safer in a world filled with things they couldn’t control.

Or maybe Margaret knew exactly what she was doing.

I’m comfortable leaving that door cracked open.

What I’m not doing is throwing the shoe in the dumpster.

I can already picture the conversation. Jack walks into the kitchen, sees the shoe sitting there and asks what we’re doing with it. I explain what I’ve discovered and tell him it’s going back where we found it. Meanwhile, one guy on the construction crew thinks this is ridiculous, another is laughing, and the older guy who’s been doing demolition for thirty years suddenly gets very quiet.

Then he says, “I’d leave it.”

That’s the guy I’m listening to.

Because he has stories.

You know he has stories.

He’s not telling you all of them because he wants to go home tonight and sleep, but something happened in a house in 2004 involving an attic, and whatever it was permanently changed his opinion about removing things that don’t belong to him.

So Margaret’s shoe stays.

And really, are we so different from her?

We knock on wood. We cross our fingers. We have lucky jewelry. We don’t say certain things out loud because we don’t want to jinx them. We bless houses, hang crosses and horseshoes near doors, and keep objects that belonged to people we loved because somehow those objects still feel connected to them.

And any sensible person knows there are certain statements you simply don’t make.

Never announce that something is “finally fixed.” You can think it. You can quietly appreciate it. You can walk past the repaired object and give it a respectful little nod. But do not stand in the middle of your house and announce, “Well, thank God THAT problem is finally over.”

Why tempt things?

Sports fans understand this perfectly. A grown man can spend three hours discussing statistics and defensive strategy while wearing the same unwashed jersey because his team won the last time he wore it. He may laugh at Margaret’s protective shoe while simultaneously refusing to change seats during the fourth quarter because “we started scoring when I sat here.”

Margaret would understand him perfectly.

I keep imagining her when the house was new. The walls were open, wood shavings covered the floor and somebody was working near the fireplace when she walked in carrying an old shoe. Maybe it belonged to her husband. Maybe one of her children. Maybe it was hers. Perhaps her mother had taught her that an old shoe belonged near the hearth to protect the home.

So she put it there.

Nothing dramatic happened. No thunder. No mysterious woman appeared from the forest. Somebody closed the wall and everyone got on with their lives.

Meals were cooked. Babies arrived. Children grew up. People argued, laughed and worried about money. Generations lived in that house until eventually nobody remembered there was a shoe inside the wall.

The shoe stayed anyway.

Two hundred years later, somebody decides they need quartz countertops and suddenly Margaret is back in the conversation.

If it were my house, I’d photograph the shoe and document exactly where we found it. I’d probably lose the rest of the afternoon researching it while the kitchen renovation came to a complete halt because priorities have clearly changed.

Then I’d put it back exactly where it was.

If the contractor said, “Good,” I’d know I’d hired the right contractor.

If he thought it was ridiculous, that’s fine too. Everybody gets to believe whatever they believe. He can think Margaret’s shoe is nothing more than an old piece of leather somebody stuffed into a wall two centuries ago. I can believe it may have been put there for protection.

Neither of us needs to prove a damn thing.

We just need to agree on one important construction detail.

Don’t fuck with Margaret’s shoe.