I Am So (Sadly) Excited About My New Bunion Socks
I Am So (Sadly) Excited About My New Bunion Socks
I got a package in the mail from Thailand today. It said on the outside label, “For your Bunions. Love, Kim”. And you would have thought I’d just gotten a care package of still-warm Barefoot Contessa cinnamon buns from Ina herself I was so excited.
So I put them on, and...it feels a little like my toes are freshly ground sausage meat being pushed in or out of the encasing. I’m not sure which. My daughter saw me wearing them and gasped, “WHAT happened to your feet?”
I guess they look a little like a plaster cast that someone designed to also be pedicure-accessible.
And handcrafted in Thailand, no less! (I don’t know that they’re hand crafted, but it’s hard to imagine a machine being calibrated to make these.) Alas, there were no instructions in the package. Do I wear them for an hour? Overnight? All week? Do I stuff my feet into shoes with these things on? Do I have to wear them out in the world like the social death sentence of my headgear in 6th grade? There are questions remaining about my new bunions socks.
My husband took one look at them and said, “Now that’s something to blog about.” Bunion socks, it seems, arouse even less than the actual bunions.
And who would send someone bunion socks? What kind of a person does that?
I’ll tell you who. Someone who TRULY loves you. In my case, Kim. Kim is my mom’s first cousin. Kim is a new(ish) grandmother and a still-working optometrist who is also caring for her aging mother. Amidst all of that, Kim remembered me talking about my bunions (well, we were at a funeral, so of course I brought them up) and took time out of her life to order me toe-separating socks.
This is the kind of magic that sometimes happens between women. You’re in your 40’s, and you come home from yet another crappy arts conference, where some woman told you to “breathe joy into your cheeks” and everyone was all gaga about a session called “Radical Listening” that, after a two hour panel, you realized was exactly the same as regular listening, and you’re all about to complain about the indignity of your time being wasted when you could have used that time to solve all the many problems and hanging threads in your life, when there, stuffed into your mailbox is a the gift of bunion socks. A product you didn’t even know existed!
There are wonders yet in the world.
Will they work? Probably not. But as the tips of my toes grow icy cold, even while my heels are toasty, my bunion socks warm my spirit. Kim is adamant that bunion sufferers need to keep the toes separated. It eases the strain or it realigns or some other good thing to alleviate bunion pain.
So while I’m displeased I have bunions (really, all cute shoes are off the table), I’m psyched to know there are women in my life who would order me bunion socks. Is there a lady bunion sufferer in your life? Google bunion socks and go make her day!