Below is an excerpt from a piece Fernanda wrote for More.

It is late morning—well, actually, maybe it’s more like early afternoon. I am wandering around the house in my pajamas, trying to remember where I left my cup of coffee, when I notice a strangely familiar sound: an aimless, arrhythmic sort of sound that is the shuffle of slippers across a wooden floor.

It is the noise of my childhood, the noise my mother made at odd hours, trailing through our New York apartment, looking for some book hidden away in the back-hall bookshelf or perhaps trying to figure out where she’d put her to-do list. My mother, like me, was a stay-at-home writer, and unless she was going out to lunch, she spent her days curled up in bed with a stack of books and papers or scuffing about the apartment on undefined quests.

Suddenly I can picture the weird clumpy slippers this otherwise chic woman wore throughout the 1960s and much of the ’70s: black suede booties lined in white lambswool and fastened with huge Flintstone-type bone buttons that looked as if they’d come from a mastodon tusk. Bedroom slippers designed to survive arctic exposure, or a Park Avenue apartment from which my warmer-blooded father had insisted on removing all the radiators.

You can read the full text here.

More Magazine, mother, Park Avenue