There Was An Old Woman, Who Lived In A Shoe…

…and she freakin’ loved it. Chirky was her name if my memory serves me correctly.

There was a time when Esmerelda and I would sit on the front porch for hours just watching her sitting in her lawn in front of that shoe just beaming. Most people don’t know how Chirky ended up living in a shoe, but Esmerelda and I know…

It all started one day when Chirky came into town looking to have her Manolo Blahnik’s repaired. It seems that a wild night out on the town, which normally included dancing on table tops and endless games of Wahoo, had caused her to break a heel on her rather pricey shoes and so she decided to see if the cobbler could fix it for her.

The town cobbler, Rojer Ferrees, was a rather well known man about the town and he loved shoes so much that he decided to build his home like a large glass slipper – yes, just like one of Cinderella’s. In the sunlight the house sparkled brilliantly like a magnificent diamond and people travelled from all over the country to get a look at it.

Chirky had never heard of Rojer Ferrees or his famous shoe home, but when he fixed her Manolo’s she felt a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach that was unlike anything that she had ever felt before. According to Chirky, “I felt like I was getting sick, but it sort of felt good.”

If Esmerelda were still alive she could give you more details of their fateful encounter as she had been close friends with Chirky’s mother. You would have loved Esmerelda, she was always baking cookies and telling great stories.

But back to the story…

Rojer Ferrees had never met a woman quite like Chirky and when he repaired her shoes, he invited her to his house for some rasperry chocolate cake and Coke Zero. The odd combination just so happened to be Chirky’s favorite treat and so she accepted without hesitation.

Upon arriving at Rojer’s shoe house, she fell instantly in love. The shoe was glorious. The heels, if they had been scaled down to size, would have been 5 inch stillettos. The front door looked like a perfect little buckle that held down an intricately designed “strap”. She stood back and gasped, “This is yours!?”

20 years and 20 kids later Chirky still lived in the shoe. She wasn’t old, like the story claimed, quite the contrary. It seemed that pregnancy had kept Chirky quite youthful and she had even managed to retain her a lean figure. Mother Goose, the woman that wrote the poem about the old woman that lived in a shoe was really quite jealous of Chirky. You see, Mother Goose did indeed look like a Goose and she really wanted to live in a shoe and so it was out of spite that she wrote that mean nursery rhyme about Chirky. Esmerelda, God rest her soul, would tell you that Mother Goose had an awful crush on Chirky, but no one knows if that is true or not.

So now you that you know the truth behind the old lady that lived in a shoe… and the truth is all that really matters.