Shoes can hide mysterious things

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Pets come with a lot of responsibility. You have to feed and water them. You are required to clean up after them. Some kinds of pets, like dogs, also need exercise or their social needs taken care of.

I also learned that pets require you learn to tip your shoes upside down before you put them on. You just never know what is inside your shoes, unless you check. While I could check by jamming my foot in and hoping for the best, it really is a lot nicer to know exactly what you are getting into.

The habit started with the barn shoes. Sometimes, critters find the dark, quiet place inside a pair of shoes and decide to camp out there. I don’t really want to get bitten by a scared and angry little animal.

Getting a puppy meant I learned that I need to check my other shoes, too. I still do check each pair of shoes, even though my puppy is now a “grown-up baby” and doesn’t live with me, much to my boyfriend’s amusement.

Going outside seems to pick up an assortment of dirt. Once in a while, a clump of grass clippings or a small stone falls out. A spider came crawling out one of the more recent times I dumped out my shoes before putting them on.

There was a time when I almost always found a surprise waiting for me in my shoes. My dog, Lacy, was just a puppy at the time and her first summer was filled with discovering all sorts of wonderful things. Because Lacy knew she was my friend, she decided to play a game of show and tell with me throughout the summer season.

Lucky me, I never had to look too hard for the things she wanted to show me.

The first time I was the unwilling participant in the game, I went out to the garage to find the shoes I had just worn a few hours prior, now had a partially decayed critter in them.

When I wondered out loud how something that far gone ended up in my shoes, Lacy sheepishly wagged her tail. She seemed to think it was a cool thing she found. I took the dead animal to the compost bin, much to her disappointment.

The poor dog didn’t learn her lesson that summer. I found a lot of dried up frogs and dead mice in my shoes, and Lacy never got a single one of them back.

There was even a gravel stone at least an inch in diameter in them once. That probably would have hurt to step on. She didn’t even seem to want the rock back, but she must have thought it was special enough to warrant showing me.

I definitely don’t miss finding dead stuff in my shoes every time I walk out the door, but I do miss Lacy being a puppy. She was cute and funny. We still tell her she’s cute and she’s just as funny now, but she doesn’t do naïve puppy things anymore.

Lacy does still hold a special place in her heart for dead things, mice and frogs. She has wised up to putting them in my shoes, because she decided she prefers to either roll in, or eat, the good things she finds.

I’m not risking it. It would be just my luck that Lacy decides to show me something by putting it in my shoe when I least expect it.

Plus, we constantly have kittens of various sizes venturing into the house. When they are done tangling up the shoelaces, they could put something into the shoe. Or, curl up for a nap inside a pair of shoes themselves.

Looking back, I’m thankful that I only returned to my shoes to find dead critters and rocks in them. I’ve seen far too many pictures of destroyed shoes strewn across the room, with a guilty looking dog in the background. Or, worse, a shredded couch or wall.

At least I was left with a pair of shoes to empty.