Nimbao ad: Slippers Nobody Looks Twice At

For three years I have been scheduling my client showings before noon, and last month a woman at the paint counter of a hardware store asked me if I was alright. My name is Deborah. I am fifty-nine years old. I have been a real estate agent in the same mid-sized Southern city for twenty-six years. I sell houses. I have sold them in this city long enough that I have sold the same house twice, once to a young couple in 1998 and again to the couple's daughter in 2019. I have sold houses to grandmothers moving to be near their grandchildren and to widowers moving out of the house they raised their children in and to newlyweds and to divorcees and to the same relocation attorney every three or four years when his firm moves him. I love this work. I have loved this work for twenty-six years. Half the houses I show now are shoes-off houses. New hardwood, white carpet, a little sign by the door and a basket of blue paper booties. I slip my pumps off on their mat and walk their house in my stockings, and I have done it a thousand times. Three years ago, at fifty-six, I started losing the afternoons. I want to be careful about how I describe it because it did not come with a diagnosis. My feet are fine. My doctor has said so at every annual physical for the last three years. Everything is where it should be. There is nothing to prescribe. There is nothing to treat. She has said, kindly, that some of what I am describing is what a lot of women my age describe, a foot that fills a shoe by afternoon that fit it at seven, and to keep doing the things I am already doing, the walking, the sensible heels, the feet up in the evening, and to come back next year. She is not wrong. She is my doctor and she is a good one and I trust what she has told me. But at 3 in the afternoon, for the last three years, something in me has stopped at other people's front doors. Not sore the way your feet are sore at the end of a long day. Not stiff the way they are stiff after a long drive. Something else. A door. A wall. An hour and a half where I cannot walk a buyer through a shoes-off house. Where my stockings slide on their hardwood and my hand goes to their wall on the stairs, and the pump I took off at their door at 3 does not want to go back on at 3:40, and I want, more than anything, to sit down on somebody's front step for twenty minutes and not be looked at. By 5:30 I am home, out of the pumps, in my bare feet on my own kitchen tile, and it lifts. I can finish the workday. I can make dinner. I can be my normal self at 8 PM. But the hour and a half in the middle of the afternoon has become the hardest ninety minutes of my day. I have been quietly restructuring my life around it for three years. I stopped scheduling showings after 1 PM. If a client wants to see a house at 3, I offer them noon or 5. Most of them take the noon or the 5. The ones who don't, I get through the showing in the blue paper booties with one hand on the banister, and I sit in my car in the driveway for ten minutes afterward working my shoes back on. I stopped scheduling closings after 2 PM. Closings are long. Closings start with a final walk-through, and a final walk-through is an empty house with nothing on the floors but the shine, and a staircase, in my stockings. Closings at 3 with a distracted buyer and a nervous seller and a stack of paperwork have become impossible for me in a way they never were before. I put an unwritten block on my calendar every day from 2:30 to 4. My assistant Karen calls it my "meeting." She does not know what the meeting is. The meeting is me sitting in my car in the parking lot of whatever coffee shop is closest to my next appointment, with the driver's seat reclined and both pumps standing on the passenger seat, with the AC on in the summer and the heater on in the winter, waiting for my feet to be the feet that fit them. I have not told my husband about the meeting. I have not told Karen about the meeting. I have not told anyone about the meeting. I have carried this for three years because I did not have a word for it and because my feet were fine and because the version of me who admitted she needed ninety minutes in her car every afternoon was not the version of me I wanted to be. Last month I decided to repaint my office. The office I have worked out of for eleven years is on the second floor of a small brokerage on the main square. I have a desk, two client chairs, a bookshelf, and a wall of framed photos of houses I have sold and the families who bought them. The walls were a color the previous agent had picked in 2011. A kind of tired taupe. I had been meaning to repaint for three years. That Saturday I drove to the hardware store on the far side of town, the good one, the family-owned one, not the box store, because they have a paint counter with a woman who has been mixing paint there for as long as I have been selling houses. Her name is Doris. She's the one who mixed the paint for my current office in 2013. I had come straight from a 1 PM showing that ran long, and my pumps had not gone back on at the door. So I drove across town in the blue paper booties, with my pumps on the passenger seat, because I thought nobody looks at your feet at a paint counter. I brought her a swatch. A soft warm cream, almost a very pale butter yellow. Something that would make my office feel like a room a widow could sit in without wanting to cry. Doris was not there that day. The woman at the paint counter was a woman I had never seen before. She was in her mid-sixties. Reading glasses on a chain. A hardware-store apron that said her name was Ruth. She smiled at me when I walked up and asked what I needed. I gave her the swatch. She looked at it, nodded, keyed the formula into the computer, and started pulling the base and the tints. She said the mixing and shaking would take about six minutes. I stood at the counter waiting. Ruth watched the machine. Then she turned to me and she said, very quietly, "Ma'am. Are you alright?" I said, "Yes, I'm fine. Just tired." Ruth said, "You're standing in those the way I used to stand in mine at exactly this time of day." I stood at that paint counter in my paper booties and I did not know what to say. I looked at my watch. It was 2:47 in the afternoon. I said, "Excuse me?" Ruth said, "I'm sorry. That was a strange thing to say to a customer. I'm going to say it once more and then I'll let it be. When I was your age I could not get through an afternoon of other people's front doors. From about 2:30 to 4 every day. I thought I was going to have to retire early. And I want to be very careful about this next part, ma'am, because I do not sell anything and I do not want you to think I do. There was one thing I added to my bag that made a difference to the afternoons. It's not a treatment. It's not a medicine. It's a slipper. I've carried a pair for six years. And if you'd like to come by my house on a Saturday morning, I'd tell you what it is." She said her shift ended at 5. She would be at the counter for the rest of the afternoon. She wrote her address and her phone number on the back of a paint chip and slid it across the counter. She said, "You don't have to come. If you don't call, I'll assume you're doing fine. I will not say another word about it if you come through this counter again. But if you'd like to come by, come on Saturday morning around ten. I have iced tea and I usually have some watermelon." The paint machine finished shaking. She handed me my gallon. I paid for it and I drove home and I sat in my driveway for a long time with the paint chip in my hand. I told my husband Ben about it at dinner. Ben has been asking me for three years what is going on with me between 2:30 and 4 in the afternoon. He has watched me stop taking his calls between those hours. He has watched me schedule dinners for 6:30 instead of 5:30. He has watched me come home some evenings carrying my pumps up the front walk like a woman who had walked ten miles when what I had done was show one house at noon and sit in my car for ninety minutes in the afternoon. He has been patient about it and he has been kind. But he had noticed. He had noticed for three years. He just had not pressed. I told him about Ruth. I told him about the paint chip. Ben said, "Go. Saturday. Ten AM. Go and hear what the woman has to say." I said, "She's a stranger." Ben said, "She's a stranger who saw at 2:47 in the afternoon what I have been seeing for three years." I said, "Ben." He said, "Go, Deborah." Saturday morning I drove to Ruth's house. She lived in a small ranch on a quiet street on the north edge of town. Well-kept lawn. A porch with two rocking chairs and a small round table. A hummingbird feeder hanging from the eave. She came to the door in a cotton dress and reading glasses on a chain and she led me to the porch. There was iced tea in a glass pitcher on the table with a plate of cut watermelon and a small bowl of salt. She poured me a glass. Cut me a piece of watermelon and sprinkled a little salt on it, the way you do in the South. She sat down across from me in the other rocking chair. She said, "Thank you for coming. I want to start by telling you what I'm not. I am not a doctor. I am not a nurse. I don't have a wellness Instagram. I do not sell these. Nobody pays me to talk about them. Nobody knows I'm having this conversation with you today. I worked at a paint counter for four years after I retired from a job I did for thirty-two years because my husband is retired and I like being out of the house one or two days a week. That is the whole of who I am." I laughed. She smiled. She said, "What I did for thirty-two years was homebound teaching for the school district. Children too sick or too hurt to come to school for a month or a year. Nine to three in other people's living rooms, four or five front doors a day, and a mother at every one of them who asked me, kindly, to leave my shoes on the mat. And the same hour and a half every single afternoon where by 2:30 I had been in and out of my shoes at four doors and was standing on somebody's hardwood in my stockings with one hand on the back of a dining chair, and by 4 I was in my car, and by 5:15 I was driving home wondering what had happened to me." She said, "That started in my late fifties. Same as yours." She said, "For a couple of years I did what you're doing. I moved things around. I put the hardwood houses in the morning. I bought a pair of flats half a size up for the afternoons. I carried a pair of those hospital socks in my bag, the ones with the rubber dots on the bottom, and I felt like a patient in every living room I stood in. I tried a lot of things at the edges." "None of it fixed the afternoons." "By sixty-two I was ready to retire two years early because I could not face another year of the 3 PM wall." She said, "The thing that changed it was the other homebound teacher, the one who had the north half of the county. Her name was Delphine. She was five years older than me. She had gone through the same thing at fifty-eight and had figured out something that had made a difference for her, and one afternoon in April when she saw me come into the district office at 3:30 carrying my shoes the way I carried them every day, she followed me to my desk and she said, 'Ruth, would you let me tell you what I did?'" "I said yes." "She told me she had done a lot of looking. She had gone looking for something between a sock and a shoe. She said what she had found was a slipper built like a sock, a knit that stretches over the foot, with a real rubber sole under it. Thin. It holds onto a floor. It's cut low like a flat, so on somebody's hardwood it reads as a shoe you happened to have on. She said it isn't a treatment for anything. It isn't a medicine. It's the thing between your foot and a stranger's floor, and it folds flat in a bag." "She said she had asked the first mother at the first door before she wore them into the house. The mother had looked at them and said, of course, those are fine, those are house shoes." "Delphine had been carrying them for a year at that point. She said her afternoons were not what they had been. She was careful about how she said it. She said, 'Ruth, I still have days when 3 PM is hard. This is not a cure for the afternoons. But the afternoons don't own me the way they used to. And that is a different life than the one I was living last April.'" "She told me the brand. She wrote it on a Post-it and stuck it to my computer monitor." "I looked at that Post-it for two weeks before I ordered a pair." Ruth said, "They came on a Tuesday. I held them up at the first door on Wednesday morning, a mother on Hollis Street with white carpet, and asked whether she'd mind them on her floors." "She looked at them and said, 'Those are fine, honey, those are house shoes.'" "I put the hospital socks in the glove box that day and they never came out." "The brand is called Nimbao. They call them Cloud Slippers. They're knit, like a sock, with a rubber sole under them, and they fold flat. You keep them in your bag. You step into them standing up at the door, and you step out of them standing up on the way out, and they go back in the bag." "There's a reason they're made that way. A slipper with a puffy top and a thick bottom is a slipper, and it looks like one on a stranger's floor, and it does not go in a bag. These are cut low. The knit stops under the ankle bone. Nothing on them, no bow, no fur, no name. And the sole is thin rubber that holds a hardwood floor, so your hand stays off the wall. Knit, rubber, flat in the bag, out at the door." "They go through the wash. One pair, every day." "Added to whatever else I was already doing. Not replacing any of it." She said, "Deborah. I want to be careful about the next part because I do not want to overstate what happened. I am one woman. My feet are my feet. What happened for me might not happen for you. It might happen slower. It might happen differently. It might not happen at all. Bodies are different." "What I can tell you is what I noticed." "The first two weeks I noticed nothing. I stepped into them at the door and out of them at the door and did not think about them, which I suppose was the whole of it. I almost quit because I was tired of carrying a pair of slippers around in my bag for two weeks like a woman who had given up, and having nothing to show for it." "Around the end of the third week, on a Wednesday afternoon, I was standing in a kitchen on Hollis Street going over long division with a boy in a leg cast, and I looked up at the clock over her stove and it was 3:20 and I hadn't noticed. I was standing on her tile with both hands on his worksheet and the clock had gone past me without stopping me. I stood there and I stared at the clock for a minute. And then I went back to work." "That was the moment." "Not a switch. Not a dramatic thing. The clock just went past me." She said, "Over the next couple of months the afternoons kept doing that. Some afternoons the clock went past me and some afternoons it didn't. Some 3 PMs I still wanted the car. But the every-day-at-2:30-a-wall pattern got quieter, and quieter, and by the end of the first summer I was not scheduling my life around the afternoons anymore." "I stayed in that job for another six years past when I had thought I would retire early. I retired last year when I was ready to, not when the afternoons were making me. I have carried a pair now for six years. I am on my third pair. Still folded in the bag every morning. Still out at the door. Added to everything else I do. Not replacing any of it." She reached across the table and cut me another piece of watermelon. She said, "That's all I have." She wrote the brand name on the back of another paint chip. She had a small stack of them in her apron pocket. Habit, I suppose, from four years at the paint counter. She handed it to me. She said, "Deborah. I am not a doctor. Delphine wasn't a doctor. My doctor didn't recommend them. I am a woman who took a name off a Post-it six years ago and I would not have gone home last Saturday night knowing I had watched a real estate agent stand at my paint counter at 2:47 in the afternoon in a pair of paper booties and said nothing." "Ask the next seller. Hold them up at the door. Ask whether they're alright on her floors. If she says no, then no. If she says yes, get a pair and carry them for a month. Give it a month. That's all I would ask." She said, "Come back and see me at the paint counter and tell me what the seller said. I'll be there Wednesdays and Saturdays through the end of October." I finished my iced tea and my watermelon. I hugged her at the door. I drove home. I told Ben everything that night. I called my broker's office Monday morning. I described them to Marlene. Knit, cut low, a rubber sole, nothing on them. Asked if there was any reason I shouldn't walk a buyer through a listing in them. Marlene called back Wednesday afternoon. She said if they were clean and they did not look like a bedroom, she did not care what I stood on a hardwood floor in. Mention it to the seller at the door. I ordered a pair Wednesday night. I ordered the Leopard Brown. Ruth's were the Leopard Brown, and on her porch they had looked like a flat you'd wear to lunch. They came Saturday. Sunday morning I sat at the kitchen table with my coffee. Ben set the package down in front of me next to the cup. I took them out. I stood up, and I stepped into them right there on the kitchen tile without sitting back down, and I walked to the sink and back. I said, "Ben. It's a sock with a floor under it." He said, "That's what Ruth said her friend said." I laughed. I folded them into my bag every morning after that. I want to be careful about what I tell you next because I do not want to overstate what happened. I am one woman. My feet are my feet. What happened for me might not happen for you. It might happen slower. It might happen differently. It might not happen at all. Bodies are different. The first two weeks I noticed nothing. Ben asked me every evening if anything had shifted and every evening I said no. Around the end of the third week, a Thursday afternoon in September, I was at a client showing at 2 PM in a shoes-off house on Magnolia, which I had scheduled at 2 because there was no other time that worked for the buyer, and I had spent the morning bracing myself for the front door that I knew was coming at 2:30. At the door I slipped my pumps off and stepped into the slippers standing up. The seller said they were fine. The buyer did not look down at all. I walked her across the hardwood and up the stairs with both hands free. The wall came a little late. It came around 3, at the door on the way out, when the pumps did not want to go back on. It was smaller than it had been, because I had something else to walk out in. So I did not put them on. I walked to my car in the slippers with the pumps in my hand, and nobody on Magnolia looked twice, and I did not have to sit down. I drove to my next appointment. I did not sit in a parking lot with the seat reclined. I did not have my meeting. I went home that evening and I told Ben. He put down the dish he was drying and he looked at me for a long moment. He said, "Deborah. You just described a normal Thursday afternoon." I said, "I know." He said, "You haven't had a normal Thursday afternoon in three years." I said, "I know." I cried a little into a dish towel. Ben held me for a long time. Over the next couple of months the afternoons kept getting quieter. Not every afternoon. There were still days when 3 PM was hard. There were still days when the pumps stayed in my hand until I got home, and days when my feet wanted to be up on the couch by 4. But the every-day-at-2:30-a-wall pattern got quieter, and quieter, and by the end of October I was not scheduling my life around the afternoons the way I had been. I opened up the 2 PM and 3 PM slots on my calendar again. My assistant Karen asked if I was sure. I said I was sure. I showed a house at 3 on a Tuesday in November. The seller was elderly. She had lived in the house for fifty-one years. It was a shoes-off house, fifty-one years of waxed pine. I stepped into the slippers at her door and she said, "Oh, those are nice, where did you get those," and that was the whole of what anybody said about my feet all afternoon. The buyer was a young woman who reminded me of the daughter of one of the couples I had sold to in 1998. The showing went for an hour and a half. I sat with the seller afterward at her kitchen table and we drank sweet tea and she told me about her husband and the house they had built together and I listened. I drove home at 5. I did not sit in the driveway for ten minutes when I got there. I walked in the front door with my pumps in my hand and Ben looked up from his book and I said, "Hey." He said, "Hey." That was all. I went back to the paint counter on a Saturday two weeks later. Doris was there that day. So was Ruth. Doris waved at me from the mixing machine. Ruth was helping another customer. When she finished she turned and saw me and her face did a small quiet thing. She said, "Deborah." I said, "Ruth. I showed a house at 3 PM on a Tuesday last week. Shoes off. Fifty-one years of waxed pine. I walked every room of it and the seller asked me where I got them. I sat with her at her kitchen table for an hour afterward and I drove home at 5 and I walked in my front door without sitting in the driveway first. I have not done that in three years." Ruth put her hand over her mouth for a second. She said, "Oh, honey." I said, "I know." She said, "Come around the counter. Just for a minute." I went around the counter. She hugged me. She smelled like paint and iced tea. She said, "I'm glad I said something." I said, "So am I." I bought a can of clear polyurethane I did not need and went home. I want to be careful about how I close this because I do not want to overstate what happened. The 3 PM wall is not gone. I still have afternoons. I am fifty-nine years old and my feet are fifty-nine and they will do what fifty-nine-year-old feet do by 3 in the afternoon. But the pattern that had me sitting in parking lots for ninety minutes every day for three years is not the pattern I am living anymore. I do not know how much of it was the slippers. I really don't. My doctor at my last physical did not credit the slippers. She credited the walking I have kept up and the reasonable sleep and the summer being over and cooler weather being on its way. She said, kindly, that a lot of things could account for what I was describing. She is a scientist. She does not credit slippers. Which is fine. I did not need the credit. I just needed the afternoons back. Here's what the slipper is for, plainly. It goes between your foot and somebody else's floor. It's knit, so it stretches over the foot instead of squeezing it, with room at the toes. It has a thin rubber sole under it that holds a hardwood floor, so your hand stays off the wall. It folds flat in a bag. It does not look like a slipper. That's the whole of what it's for. It isn't a promise about your afternoons, or your 3 PM, or your calendar, or anything at all. It isn't a promise about anything. Some women notice something at the first door. Others take much longer to stop reaching for the pumps on the way out. Some, I'd imagine, not much at all. Bodies are different. Mine is one, with one story. It's a slow thing, carried steadily. The habit of a door builds up gradually, not overnight. It isn't a thing you reach for on an afternoon that has already gone quiet on you at a stranger's front step. It's a pair you fold into the bag every morning whether the afternoon before was easy or the afternoon before was hard or the afternoon before was the same as the afternoon before that. If you are a woman reading this and you have been quietly restructuring your life around an afternoon that used to work and doesn't work anymore, if you have been scheduling around it and taking meetings in your car and not telling your husband or your assistant or your closest friend why 3 PM has become the hardest hour of your day: Ask whoever owns the floor. The seller, the daughter-in-law, the friend with the white carpet. Especially if there's already a sign by the door and a basket of booties. Ask the plain question: are these alright on your floors? If they say yes, and there's a fair chance they will, it's a pair of knit slippers folded flat in the bag in the morning. On top of everything else. Not in place of any of it. If they say no, then no. Either way, you've had a conversation you weren't going to have. And if there is a Ruth in your life, a woman at a paint counter or a checkout aisle or a pew three rows back at church, who sees what nobody else has seen and finds the nerve to say something to you at 2:47 on a Saturday afternoon, let her say it. I had been carrying it alone for three years. It took a woman I did not know to give me a slip of paper. That is the whole of it. That is what a paint counter, and a Saturday morning porch, and a plate of watermelon with a little salt on it, and a phone call to my broker's office, between them did for me. And I would be a poor sort of woman not to pass it on. P.S. Ruth and I have lunch every other Wednesday now. She still works Wednesdays and Saturdays at the paint counter. Ben says I have made a friend at fifty-nine that I did not think I would make. I told him that a woman who says something to you at 2:47 in the afternoon becomes a friend fast. Delphine, the woman who told Ruth six years ago at the district office, I have not met. But Ruth told her about me. She sent Ruth a card that said "Tell Deborah welcome to the club." I have that card on my refrigerator. P.P.S. I keep a second pair in the hall closet now. Nimbao is a small company and they've sold out before. The Leopard Brown was already gone the week Karen went looking for hers, and a woman who spent three years sitting in parking lots at 2:30 in the afternoon is not about to run low on the thing she folds into a morning that has stopped feeling like sitting in parking lots. It sits next to my lockbox key, every day. P.P.P.S. The steps, in order: Ask whoever owns the floor first. Hold them up at the door and ask if they're alright. If yes, fold a pair into the bag each morning and step into them at the door, standing up. Change nothing else, just add it. Then give it a few weeks. Some notice something at the first door, others longer, some not much at all. Be patient with yourself. P.P.P.P.S. If you're between sizes, go up. Most women I've sent to them are happiest one size up. Room for the toes at 3 in the afternoon is the whole point. P.P.P.P.P.S. This past Thursday I showed a house at 3:30 in the afternoon to a young couple who reminded me of Ben and me thirty-two years ago. She was pregnant. He was nervous. They loved the house. Shoes off, and I stepped into the slippers on the mat and neither of them looked down. We stood in the living room and I watched her put her hand on the bay window and I watched him watch her, and I knew before either of them did that they would put in an offer that night. I drove home at 6:15 and Ben had made dinner and we ate on the porch. It was still light out. I told him about the couple. I told him about the bay window. I told him I thought they were going to be very happy in that house. And I sat there on the porch with my husband in the September light and I ate dinner and I did not think one single time about my feet. That is not a headline. It is a small quiet thing. But the small quiet things, a woman in her late fifties eating dinner on a porch with her husband and not thinking about her feet, are the ones worth telling someone at a paint counter about. https://www.nimbao.com/cloudsock