It seemed like such a stroke of good fortune at first. We were looking for a pair of sandals for Richard, who had always been fond of Birkenstocks (I’m a Dansko fan, myself), but his knee surgeon told him that the negative heel wasn’t good for his knees. Since we were visiting my brother in San Diego, we had headed to the REI in Encinitas to see what we could find. While there, Richard spotted a pair of leather Tevas, which were very cool-looking, so he tried them on. They fit perfectly! It was the last pair in the store, too, which made us feel particularly lucky. They were comfortable right away, didn’t need any breaking in. And they really did look nice.

 

However, not long after Richard purchased these sandals, happily wearing them every day, I began to notice a funny smell. After a while, it wasn’t funny, it was more … stomach-turning. Pretty soon, the smell from his sandals attached itself to his feet. I wasn’t enjoying having Richard put his feet in my lap any more the way I used to.

 

At first he wanted to protest that the smell wasn’t that bad—it wasn’t! Then we flew to Little Rock to visit his parents and he had to take his shoes off to go through security at the airport. When we met up on the other side of the security gate, he sheepishly said to me, “Maybe you’re right. That security guard left her post when my shoes came through.”

 

Now, you know that’s bad!

 

The sandals got so smelly that I took to stashing them inside the closet when we stayed at motels, but then they stunk up any clothes I hung in there. When we were staying at his parents’ house, I put them outside overnight when it wasn’t raining. I wedged them under a chair in a corner of the least-used room in the condo when it was. Pretty soon they seemed to take on epic, even mythic proportions. I began to think I was smelling them after we returned home and Richard was gone at work, taking his sandals with him.

 

I went on the Internet, looking for solutions to stinky shoes. A number of elaborate remedies came up, and we tried some of them, but they didn’t work all that well. I began eyeing the sandals, wondering if they could meet with an “accident,” but Richard caught my drift. “Don’t even think about it!” he protested. “These are the most comfortable sandals I’ve ever owned!”

 

Sigh. Okay. I could relate. But anyone who read my blog about the Highly Sensitive Person can probably imagine what this odor was doing to me. Richard was taking his sandals off as soon as he came home and washing his feet every evening before settling in, but the sandals … well, the sandals hunkered under our stairway like two smelly little dogs who had rolled in a rotting seal carcass.

 

It was Richard who finally hit upon a solution. After taking them off at the end of his day, he started spraying them with the citrus spray we had in the bathroom. Thank God! Not only did it take care of the stinky sandals, it remedied his cute but smelly feet, too. So if anyone else out there has run into this problem and not known what to do, you might try this. I can’t guarantee results, but it’s worth a try.