The Case of the Caramel Corn Larva

I don’t wear brown shoes very often.

In fact, I must not wear them at all.  I didn’t even remember that I had some.

So while looking through my closet for something to wear with my new brown skirt, I was overly excited to see that I do have brown shoes.

So excited that I completely forgot about the news-show-story I saw 10 years ago about a woman who didn’t check the inside of her shoe and was bitten by a Black Widow Spider.

I put my foot in the shoe . . . and there was something IN IT!!!!

So I did what any self-respecting woman would do.  I screamed.

Bloody murder.

My loving and heroic husband called from the next room to see what in the world was wrong.  I held the shoe as far away from my body as I could and took it to him, screaming again as something fell out of it.  I had barely glanced inside the shoe and was certain that there was a large, light-colored larva in it.  HUGE.

He looked inside (a little nervously) and said . . . that it looked like caramel corn.

It was caramel corn.

The picture is of the shoe after he dumped the caramel-corn-larva in the trash.  He refused to taste it to be sure it really was caramel corn.

Now, it’s a little embarrassing to find caramel corn inside a shoe that I didn’t remember I owned.  As in, I haven’t worn it in at least a year.  Which means that the caramel-corn-larva has been inside it, inside my closet . . . for a year.

I don’t have any idea how it got there.  I don’t eat caramel corn in my closet that I know of.

Unless I do it in my sleep.

The only clue I have is that the second thing to cause screaming, the thing that jumped/fell out of the shoe, was a sliver of wallpaper.

I’m guessing that the shoe used to be at the back door (in the room I painted last November) with all of the other shoes, in the hopes of being worn.  The caramel corn probably found its way into the shoe while there.  When I reorganized our shoes last JANUARY and put away the rarely worn ones, it ended up in my closet.

I honestly don’t know which is worse, larva or caramel corn.

Or which would make a better story.