My Conspiracy Theory About The Shoes and their Secret Leader

We have a closet that’s next to the bathroom that’s next to the door that leads to the garage. Inside this closet is a barrage of… STUFF. Jackets. Sweaters. A yoga mat. Snow bibs. Winter hats and gloves and mittens and scarves. Board games. MORE board games. Two large bins of some of the best and hard-to-find, mint-condition albums ever made. And, because we are a family that takes their shoes off the second we walk through the door, this closet also has an amass of SHOES. Shoes in every size, shape, color and smell that God was ever so bold as to create. These shoes are constantly seeping and glooping out of the closet like The Blob. Remember THE BLOB? Not to be mistaken for the slob. Or the BLOG, although both of those can have Blob-like qualities. Anyway, like the true Blob, the shoes grow and GROW and consume everything in their path. And while they may not dissolve your flesh and devour your body, they do GET. YOU. They send out these tentacles in the form of itty bitty flip flops that grab you by the ankle and bring you down to the ground where you smush your face upon bits of old and crushed Cheerios. Or worse... LEGOS. But, unlike The Blob, I think their life’s ambition isn’t necessarily to kill us, so much as it is to cackle and snicker at the stupid people’s expense. Well, I finally decided: NO MORE. And so I set out to put a stop to The Shoes’ destructive ways. But because I’m a busy woman with clothes to wash and novels to revise, and because I am The MOM, I assigned this brutal task to Antonia… not because I hate her, but because she’s my oldest and most able child for most jobs of the organizing variety.

Believe it or not, she was more than happy to herd these cats we call shoes. You might even say she was delighted. Toni, the organizer, first set to work sifting through the beasts, putting them into pairs, sorting by size and type, and throwing out the ones that didn’t seem to have a significant other. Which really seemed a bit much to me. I just wanted them out of my way. But, while I choose to compare The Shoes to an ugly, mean, killing machine, Toni’s hypothesis was that The Shoes were more akin to TODDLERS in that they could easily take over again if given the run of the DAY CARE. She thought all that The Shoes really needed was some discipline, and to be separated into small, workable groups in order to get them to BEHAVE.

So, okay, whatever. I just didn’t want this task to turn into a two-week research project where I ended up needing to build a bigger house for The Shoes. But, excluding potty breaks and a spell of distraction also known as The Disney Channel, it only took about two hours for her to finish the job. IMPRESSIVE, to the tenth power. I was so awed and indebted that I gave her some good ol’ fashioned brownie points that she is socking away for a rainy day. My internal forcaster predicts it will occur this weekend.

But this post isn’t titled “Toni, My Hero.” Oh no, look again.

You see, the closet doors were finally closed. The house was calm. I was making dinner, when I heard that familiar sound of someone crashing down to the ground. YES. The Shoes had struck again, and Jonah was their next victim. I ran to his rescue and that’s when I saw. There they all were, just as sprawled and chaotic and secretly LAUGHING as ever before. And walking away from the crime scene was little Emma, wearing a pair of snow boots half the size of her body. And because it’s July, said SNOW BOOTS, my friends, were obviously at the far, far, FAR end of the closet. *sigh* So now I need Toni to hypothesize once more… on how we overthrow The Leader.