My Feet Used To Ache By Lunchtime. Then I Stopped Dreading The Walk To The Mailbox.

A note from a reader about the small Florida boutique sandal that let her stand in her own kitchen, and walk her own neighborhood, without counting the minutes until she could sit down.

I am 61 years old, and for about the last five years, my feet have ached by lunchtime almost every single day.

Not a sharp pain. Nothing a doctor ever put a name to that helped. Just a deep, tired, all over ache that started in my heels and spread, and by early afternoon I would be looking for the nearest chair the way other people look for the nearest restroom.

It changed how I lived, in small ways I did not want to admit to anyone. I stopped offering to host. I stopped walking the long way around the block with Buster, our little rescue terrier, and started cutting it short at the corner. When my husband Tom suggested we walk down to the farmers market on a Saturday, I would do the math in my head first. How far. How long I would be standing. Whether there would be somewhere to sit.

I want to tell you about a sandal, because I know how that sounds, and I also know that if you are a woman my age you may have been quietly looking for this exact thing for a long time.

What it is

It is called the Merella. It comes from a small Florida boutique called Sanibel that I had never heard of until a neighbor of mine wore a pair to a barbecue and would not stop talking about them.

It is a soft, cushioned sandal with a sole that gives underfoot the way good sand does, and a shape under the arch that holds you instead of leaving you flat. The first time I put them on, I stood up in my kitchen and the floor felt different. Softer. Like the hard part of standing had been taken out of standing.

I wore them around the house for an afternoon, half expecting the ache to arrive on schedule. It did not.

By lunchtime, for the first time in years, I had simply forgotten about my feet.

I cannot tell you everything they are made of, because I am a customer and not a cobbler. What I can tell you is how they feel, which is the only thing I was ever actually shopping for. They feel soft where my old shoes were hard, and they feel supported where my bare feet were not.

By the door, where they live now. The first pair that did not leave me aching.

The day I noticed

The real test came about a week in.

My granddaughter Emily had a swim lesson, and I went along, and I stood at the side of the pool on that hard concrete for the better part of an hour. Then we walked to the car the long way because she wanted to look at a dog. Then we stopped at the store on the way home, and I walked every aisle because I could not remember what we needed.

It was only when I got home and sat down that I realized I had been on my feet, on hard ground, for most of the afternoon, and I had not once gone looking for a chair.

I phoned my daughter Sarah, who is thirty eight and lives in Boston, and I told her about it the way you would tell someone good news.

"Mom," she said, "you sound like you did before your feet started bothering you."

She was right. I had not heard it in my own voice until she said it.

→ Read about the Merella

What changed

I had not been looking for a miracle. I had stopped believing in those for footwear sometime around my sixtieth birthday.

I had a closet full of shoes I had bought hopefully. The ones that looked supportive and felt like boards. The ones that felt soft for the first ten minutes and then had my heels aching by the parking lot. The expensive ones a salesperson promised me would change everything, that I wore twice. I had quietly decided that sore feet were simply the rent you pay for being my age, and I had stopped expecting otherwise.

Three things I noticed in the first two weeks, and I wrote them down because I knew I would want to remember.

1. The ache stopped arriving. That deep midday tiredness in my feet, the thing I had organized my afternoons around, simply did not show up on the days I wore them.

2. I walk farther without thinking. Buster gets the long way around the block again. I am not doing the distance math at the front door anymore.

3. They do not look like a compromise. They do not look like the heavy, clinical things I always assumed comfortable had to mean. They look like a sandal I would have picked anyway, and they go with everything from my summer dresses to my jeans.

Now, about the price

I want to talk about the price, because it was the thing that almost stopped me from ordering. The Merella sandals for $58.95 is, frankly, suspicious. I sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and wrote down what I had paid, or seen, for a comfortable pair of sandals like these in the last few years.

• Vionic sandals, $130
• Clarks, $90
• Sanibel Merella, $58.95

And underneath, in slightly larger letters, the only thing I could think to write. …how??

What I'd tell you if we were friends

If we were on my back porch with a glass of iced tea, and you had told me your feet ache the way mine used to, this is what I would say.

I would tell you that I spent years believing the choice was either something that looked alright and hurt, or something that helped and looked like a hospital shoe. The Merella is the quiet middle I had honestly stopped believing existed.

I would tell you the creme is the one I reach for most, the black is the one Tom says looks sharpest with everything, and the blue is the one I bought because I had not bought myself a cheerful pair of shoes in a long time. I would tell you to order two colors. If you buy two the stack discount comes off, and if you are anything like me, you will end up wearing one pair almost every day anyway.

I would tell you that the popular sizes are already showing as nearly gone. When I checked again this morning, two of the middle sizes were flagged as almost sold out. The anniversary sale ends when the sizes do, not a day later.

If you have, for longer than you would like to admit, been quietly counting the minutes until you can sit down, please do not wait for the ache to talk you out of it.

While the sizes are still in stock.

— Barbara