Girls Just Wanna Have.......Shoes!

My name is Joan, and I am a shoe-aholic.

I admit it. I am a shoe Aficionado. A connoisseur of fanciful footwear. It isn’t about the cost or the designer. It is all about the cute. When I slip on a stunning pointy-toe pump, a peep toe platform, or a darling kitten heel even my size 10 boats look fabulous.

I plan my outfits around which pair of shoes I want to wear.

Alas, I have a problem.

Since the blood clots in my lungs last month my legs and feet have been getting swollen. Swollen? A vast understatment. O. MY. GOSH! It really is horrible. It’s gruesome. I don’t even have “cankles*” anymore, these days it is more like thighkles. My poor feet are bulbulous, and there are even rolls at the base of my toes and around my ankles.
Trust me, it is not cute like a baby’s.
OK, are you grossed out yet? I am! I am much too young to be beset by this hideous deformity. It isn’t right to need a sedative just to look at your legs in the morning.

My point in this tale of woe, is that I am in anguish over the fact that I cannot fit into any cute shoes right now. When I try to wear my sassy, cheetah-print pumps the top of my foot splays over the sides like a big ol’ squishy muffin-top. Squeezing my foot into my super pointy-toe red heels is like one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters cramming her foot into the glass slipper.
Just maybe I am paying the cost for being so vain about my cute shoes.

Jesus says:

Matthew 6:28-31And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?

Joan’s translation “So, do not worry, saying, ‘What shall I wear on my feet?’

I don’t know what lesson is just waiting for me to grasp through these elephantized legs and feet. Perhaps it is as simple as maybe I don’t need cute shoes to make me feel like the belle of the ball. But just in case, maybe I’ll start a new trend of wearing them on my hands.

The Iceman Commeth

YEA! I’m back!

It’s been three weeks since the ice storm. Oh yeah, I mean THE ICE STORM. And our lives have been upside down and turned around since then.

Three weeks ago a huge storm system pelted our picturesque town with freezing rain all night. I awoke to see this beautiful sight of my backyard.The rain continued all day. About 11:00 in the morning we lost power including our home telephone and the pump that drives our well which gives us running water. In the late afternoon we began to hear snapping of tree branches. The icy drops continued to fall from the dark sky and accumulate on everything in sight.

Night came in the late afternoon. We had small pools of light thanks to all my scented candles strategically placed. Still, reading was tough by candlelight and bedtime came early.

It was an eerie night. The absolute, velvet-black surrounded us. There was no shadows, no soft glow of red, blue and green electronic reminders of power and time. The sound of creaking and cracking branches breaking and falling under the weight of ice continued all night.

The next morning I looked out the window to our backyard, the sight was not so beautiful as before, but equally breathtaking.Fallen tree limbs crossed our driveway making us captive in our dark little cocoon, which was getting colder by the minute. There was no signal for our cell phones. We could tune to our local TV station on our battery-powered radio. All day we heard updates of power outages and blocked roads.

This ICE STORM has been the most devastating natural disaster in our area since “the flood of 1937.” We have crews from all over who have come to help replace thousands of telephone poles, restore power to tens of thousands of customers, work on cable and telephone lines. The linemen have been working 16 hour days for three weeks, and there is still work to be done.


Every time I go down a street for the first time since THE ICE STORM I am astounded anew by the mess I see. There are mounds and mounds of debris piled one after another on the curb in some areas. In other yards the chaos of fallen limbs and branches remain as they fell. It is as if the task of gathering the limbs, branches, sticks, twigs and other tree-shrapnel is so overwhelming the homeowners can’t bring themselves to begin.




Here are some numbers from THE ICE STORM for my family.
9 days without power and running water in our home.
3 days without cell service.
5 nights in a hotel - thanks very much to Phil’s company!
22 days without cable and internet service.
1 happy family to have all our conveniences restored!