Emma's Hats, from The Help of Destin, Emma Irby

Emma’s Hats
Emma was a woman of many hats. And when she didn’t actually have a store bought one, she created her own patented models. Here are just a sampling:
She wore a white or black Turban, covered with baubles, brooches and pins.
She had several beige knitted “newsboy” caps. Very fuzzy and pilled from wear. One had a long string and a big pompom in the back.
Someone made her a beer can hat as a gift. The fronts of Bud beer cans were cut out and perforated around the edges, then crocheted together with mauve yarn into a ski hat. “It keep my head warm,” she said.
A hat was needed to help hold her wig on right, she said. She never left the house without her head coverings.
When she was out of hats, she would take a brown paper sack from the supermarket and roll the edges down until it fit the circumference of her head. Of course it was tall like a Top Hat, like Abraham Lincoln's Stovepipe, but it cast a lot of cool shade on a hot day!
If it rained, she had folding umbrella in her huge purse, but she also fashioned a rain bonnet (like those nifty refoldable purse ones ladie’s carried from the 1960’s) out of a grocery bag, the kind you get if you say “plastic.” She’d pull one handle under her chin and tuck the edges under around her face and in the back. Funny thing though, if it was windy it would bag out like a balloon behind her. I told her she reminded me of Sally Field in the Flying Nun. To this she would give a “hoo, hoo!”
Or maybe unlike Sister Bertrille, she was a black Mary Poppins. Maybe she really can use that umbrella to fly around over the treetops of Destin. She got to so many destinations in record time. I watched her leave my garage with her “bags” and wearing a trench raincoat. I blinked too long, and she was “Gone with the Wind.”
©2012 Athena Marler Creamer. All Rights Reserved.