Hats

Today I am grateful for hats.  I love hats.  Hats are great.  I’ll try out for a role in a play if it calls for a great hat.  I should have been in “The Music Man” and sung with the mayor’s wife.  “Pick-a-little, talk-a-little, pick-a-little, talk-a-little, pick-pick-pick, talk-a-lot, pick-a-little-more.”  Hah!  Look it up.

I almost never wear hats.  What is that all about? But I love them.  Why is that?  It used to be because of my fluffy hair and the resulting hat-head.  Now I have permanent hat-head by choice so that’s no excuse.  But I still don’t wear hats that often.  I think I might change that this summer.  Hey, it’s a goal.

I remember the Easter bonnets of my childhood.  They always had an annoying elastic string that pinched under your chin and left a mark when you took it off.  Most times you had to wear earmuffs underneath the thing because Wisconsin doesn’t run on the same Spring clock as the rest of the country.

My mom used to tell us about how back in her day, a long hatpin was a woman’s best defense against mashers.  Hey it was her day and that’s her language.  I haven’t had a masher approach for a long time.  Woe is me.  It’s probably a good thing, because I don’t think I could find a hatpin if my life depended on it.

The instructors at water aerobics requested that everyone wear “Easter” hats for water class yesterday.  Oh boy!  Another opportunity to prove I’m nuts.  I bought a bunch of stuff/junk at the Dollar Store and hauled it with me to my granddaughter’s house last weekend.  She had friends over and the four of us put together the hat in the picture.  When I dumped the junk out on the table, they all looked at me like I was senile.  Isabella said, “Um, Grandma?  This seems like too much stuff for one hat.  How is this going to work?”  She was poking through the fake flowers, stuffed bunny, eggs on sticks and fairy wings.

“Just watch and learn, grasshopper,” I said, to her confused look.  “Do you have any ribbon?  That’s the only thing I couldn’t find at the Dollar Store.”  I had those girls cutting wires and lacing flowers and trying on, holding up, creating as we went along.  Isabella provided ribbon from her private stock, negotiating a large flower in exchange. 

I’m grateful for hats and also that with a few snips of the scissors, and a couple of un-bent wires, the whole thing comes apart and becomes “normal” again.  But before that it will be the centerpiece on my Easter table.