Feb 23, 2024 4 min read

The warmer February weather brought the annual hankering to get rid of things. In Sweden, they call it “death cleaning.” In my house, it’s called “the great shoe roundup.”

I have a sneaker problem, a propensity that’s never more evident than on the days when I decide to gather unwanted clothing and shoes and sort them; there’s one box for donating and the other for selling, the latter requiring an anxious drive to the resale shop where workers will pick through my $300 worth of items and reject all but $7 worth.

Invariably they will accept and pay me for shoes, usually a pair of hardly worn “tennis shoes.” (I stopped calling them that when I took up playing tennis in my 20s and started buying court shoes actually designed for the side-to-side foot movements of tennis. Those were literally tennis shoes.)

Now I call them sneakers, and the floor of my walk-in closet is littered with them. Thick-soled walking shoes and brightly colored fashion sneakers; there are slip-ons and lace-tied versions. My favorites lately are a brand called Allbirds, which manage to have lots of support while sporting tops made of comfy wool. The day I sat on my closet floor to gather sneakers, I counted 11 pairs, and before you think I have a shopping problem like Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex and the City,” consider my weird feet.

Cancer treatment 15 years ago left me with lymphedema in my left leg and foot; my left foot is a full shoe size larger than my right. Sometimes I’m able to split the difference when buying shoes, but that will occasionally leave me with a right shoe that’s way too big and causes me to trip.

When I find a pair of shoes I like, sneakers or otherwise, I will buy them in two sizes, a necessary approach both expensive and cumbersome: shoeboxes are stacked in the garage and too-small lefts and too-large rights are jammed into the corners of the closets. I’d like to find a “shoe buddy,” someone with uneven feet but the opposite way. We could shop together and then make the switch. In the meantime, I sit on the floor and pick through the heap, making pairs.

I’m hard on my shoes – or maybe the companies don’t make them like they used to. I was holding a pair of black, thick-soled running shoes and deciding whether to donate them or toss them altogether, and then I realized I’d bought them just last fall. Had I hiked the Appalachian Trail and forgotten? The laces were shredded to threads and the toe of the left was curled upward where the rubber sole had pulled away, turning that shoe into a mouthy flap.

It’s been said that most of us wear 20% of our clothing 80 %of the time. When I’m writing from home, I alternate between the same black yoga pants and two sweatshirts. Likewise, I must be favoring just a few pairs of the many sneakers I own.

When I was starting my career in TV news, my grandmother gave me some wardrobe advice. After you wear an outfit, move it to the end of the closet rack, something akin to the crop rotation that farmers use. Good advice, but some mornings I couldn’t face that new outfit waiting its turn.

And some mornings now, I can’t face that closet floor and its jumble of sneakers. At the back door are two boxes of castoffs, one for donation and one for resale. That box holds three pairs of sneakers, awaiting inevitable rejection.