by Jill from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
I post shoe photos to Instagram almost daily. The great majority of my shoes are Fluevog — I’ve been collecting them since the early 1990s, so I’ve got a LOT of shoes. So of course I’m part of an Instagram community of people who follow each other because of a shared madness for these shoes, but this story is such a “who knew?!” kind of a thing.
A woman who follows me and whom I also follow (Fluevogs!) once noticed that I took a photo of my shoes outside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, The Netherlands. So, as she told me later, she clicked on my bio and found a blog where I had written about various legal cases including an Indigenous land claims case in what is currently called Canada, Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (in which the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en peoples sued BC for recognition of their jurisdiction over and title to lands which have never been ceded to Canada)… in which her mother had testified! And so she sent me a note telling me about the coincidence, leading me to click on her bio, which simply read “Wet’suwet’en woman.”
I love that these joy-bringing shoes brought us together. We have since corresponded over email about various things and have twice ALMOST met in person when we were in cities fairly close to each other. She’s doing important work as a mediator in family disputes and I’m an academic interested in restorative approaches to longstanding harm, so we’ve also got some interests in common. But really, who knew that a shared love of shoes would lead to me making a friend halfway around the world! (I live in Philadelphia, not The Hague, so it’s not really halfway around the world, more like opposite ends of a large continent.) Someday, I’ll meet her in person and we’ll post joint shoe selfies to Instagram.
Do you have a Fluevog story you’d like to share with John and the world? Send it to us for a chance to win a free pair of shoes with your story featured in the next edition of The Fluevog Post!
