Mom on the Run: 1980s make comeback for casual Fridays

It's casual Friday, jeans day at the office, and I'm standing in my closet trying to complete my outfit. I pulled on my favorite dark-blue jeans, ironed a white blouse, added shiny silver earrings, and I feel totally fashionable and put together. But my feet are still bare: how to complete this ensemble? I want crisp and chic, like my blouse, but fun and colorful, too, since it is summer. But my pink clogs are clunky. My brown sandals are boring. My star sneakers are casual.

And suddenly I know, I know!, and I drop to my hands and knees and dig into the deepest, darkest recesses of my walk-in closet, where there is buried a shoe rack with … aha! Triumphant, I crawl back out, clutching my flowered shoes.

Oh, my flowered shoes! It's been so long! I grin and gaze at them for a minute. The shoes are white flats, with just the slimmest wedge heel and large primary-color cut-out flowers splashed all around, including a red one blooming front and center on each toe. They are cheerful, sharp-toed, perfect!

I bought my first pair of flowered flats in my junior year of high school; I wore them constantly, with jeans, shorts, miniskirts, long skirts. The shoes were the perfect combination of grown-up and youthful, responsible and exuberant, and I wore them until the heels ground away.

I went back to buy a second pair, but by then they were last year's style, and I was lucky to find a pair in a size too large. I bought those and tried to wear them, but the new pair were too loose and flopped off my heels, and so sadly were consigned to the deep dark corners of my closet.

Every few years in a fit of housecleaning I would think about throwing them away … but I could never bring myself to do it.

"They're not taking up much space," I'd hedge, and tuck them back into the dark. The flowered shoes brought back memories, reminded me of a freer time, "Maybe one day I'll wear them again."

And look! Maybe one day is today! I shake out the accumulated dust, hold my breath hopefully, and try them on. Oh … they fit! With time and pregnancies, my feet have grown, and now … the bigger flowered shoes are perfect! I grin and trip off to work.

In the car, I call the one person who will truly grasp the magnitude of the moment: "Mom? Guess what shoes I'm wearing?!" When I trill, "The flowered shoes!" she knows exactly which shoes I mean (I really wore them constantly), and she knows, "But they're, what, 25 years old?" And my mom laughs with me.

I spend all day delighting in my shoes—they're back!—and surprising my co-workers with their age, even as I find flecks of 25-year-old lining peeling off and sticking to my toes.

Now, I think suddenly and brightly, I need a new pair of Minnetonka beaded moccasins, just like I wore all fall and winter of 1983 and 1984— between the summers of the flowered shoes—because I'm going to have casual Fridays this fall, too … right?

Lianne Wilkens lives with her family in Manassas. She can be reached at .