Sundays

Siena Ritter, 2023

Mother clutched my four-year-old fist in her own as we parted the congregation of Lincolnton Presbyterian Church, the only non-Baptist service in our small town. It was the second Sunday of October and she had chosen a vermillion cloche with a bow that matched her dress. Cream and Crimson, she had called it that morning, smacking her lipsticked lips in the mirror. She had plucked the hat from its wooden peg, one in her wall of hundreds. Every Sunday: a hat without hesitation, an effortlessly perfect accent to her dress. 

At church, she was the Hat Lady. Children would flock to her before service, touching the seams of her hats, and stooped elderly women would marvel at their vintage splendor. At Thanksgiving, she wore a suede flower-pot hat to which she had fastened turkey feathers. For New Year’s Eve, it was a sequined casque and silk gloves. My favorite, however, was Easter, when she would don a pastel bonnet with magnolia blooms, freshly picked from the tree in front of our house. The springtime fragrance would follow her through the service. 

Her procession of hats flourished for fifteen more years, until an especially hot August during which a doctor told her she was dying. By September her curls had thinned, and in October they disappeared altogether. 

I found her in the bathroom once, pinching the places where her cheeks used to be flushed and youthful. Upturned on the ground was one of her church hats, warped as if she had tried to tear it apart and failed. I bought her a periwinkle toboggan that winter, and she tugged it over her baldness like a shield. She slept in that hat, and clung listlessly to life in that hat. It stretched and matted as she shrunk beneath it. 

Easter came and went, and her bonnet held on to last year’s dried magnolias. 

A week later, she held my hand in hers and asked me to box up her hats. They’re only harboring dust, she said. And besides, you might want to wear them one day. 

So I pulled her boxes from the basement and placed each hat between tissue paper. I ran my fingers over the straw, the velvet, the wool, and tried not to acknowledge the growing emptiness of her wall. When I placed the last hat in its box, I could not bring myself to close the lid. Instead, I left the boxes open in her closet and shoved the lids beneath my bed. 

She died in her toboggan, and when the ambulance came, it slipped from her head. I scrambled to grab it, to soak in its perfume of sweat and wildflowers before it, too, disappeared. 

The funeral was on a Tuesday, and I packed her hats in the car beforehand– Seventy-three open boxes of every Sunday we had together. At the church, I laid them on folding tables just inside the front doors, with a note that read, The Hat Lady’s Marvelous Collection: Take one; help spread her joy. As people filed in, the pews filled with more and more vibrant hats. I adjusted her Easter bonnet on my head and smiled as mother’s radiance spread through the space she had left behind. 

Every Sunday after that, the congregation collected hat ladies, and every Sunday, my mother returned through her beloved ribbons and bows.