LOOK AT WHAT I FOUND!!!!!!
My kitten hat came back to me!
I’m so fucking insanely happy. It disappeared one fateful day in November. We figured it had blown out of the backseat of the car on a dark and windy morning without anyone noticing. I scoured the fields and hills all around the house and work for it. Every day, I looked. And then once a week. And then it snowed, and I only looked when I felt very lonely for it. But I never lost hope.
I actually looked for it this morning. I didn’t want CB to know I was being lame and out looking for my hat again, so I pretended my primary goal was cleaning out all the chocolate milk cartons and old shoppers drugmart flyers from the car, instead of scouring the ditches looking for a patch of green yarn. No luck.
Then after dinner, we were sitting at the kitchen table watching Terminator 2, when CB randomly pressed pause and exclaimed “It’s 15 fucking degrees out, we should go outside!” So we did. Most of the snow was off the ground! We went into the shed and had a look at his motorcycle, which is more like the idea of a motorcycle right now. But it’s on it’s way. Then we just sort of meandered into the fields, that I have meandered in dozens of times. Most of the snow is gone from the ground so I was in the back of my mind keeping an eye out for my hat in every puddle. Then we saw this bag:
And CB said.. “Hey, that’s the bag that blew out of the back seat of the car yesterday! I saw it blow past the back of the house. You should keep an eye out, if this is the path it took, maybe the wind blew your hat–” and he didn’t even finish his thought before I found it! “MY HAT!!!!!!!” I screamed! MY HAT! There it was!
Laid out perfectly in the grass a few feet away from that grey bag, as if someone had placed it there just for me. Oh my heart. My hat. I went and picked it up. It wasn’t even very wet, for having been under 2 feet of snow for months. It felt heavier from being in a puddle, but so good and familiar. CB just stared and said “No fucking way.” It was really my hat. For real. We screamed! And hugged! And I cried and put it straight onto my head. And we hugged again. For people living around us we must have looked totally fucking nuts. Wandering out into the field, and then screaming and hugging and crying, and then going back in the house.
It was so unbelievable that it was just there, and now I have it back. Really, really crazy. I kept asking CB if it was real life.
I mentioned in my blog that I had lost my hat but didnt go into any explanations because it really did break my heart. I felt dumb about being so deeply attached to an object. But it was my constant companion, like my security blanket.
We met each other on a class trip to New York City when I was 18. It was $45 at a kooky random hat store, and at the time everyone thought I was nuts for paying that much for a novelty hat. But it felt really good and sturdy to me, the wool was thick and strong, made in Peru. By the end of the trip every kid in the class had taken a turn wearing it, like it was the class mascot. It got worn on the Empire State Building, got mustard on it at Grey’s Papaya, walked with me through Central Park, it touched Van Goghs with me at the Guggenheim and poked an Ingres at the Met. It has a droopy ear, and a hasish burn on the other one, and it’s pompoms always smell like home. It went to Europe, England and New Zealand with me! It was there the whole time CB and I have been together. It was really important. But the really reason I was heartbroken that it was lost was because of what I said before it disappeared. I took it off one morning before work. CB asked why I wasn’t going to wear my kitten hat. I said, I was embarrassed by it. I thought maybe, I was too old for it. It’s something for a kid to wear, and now I’m too old. He frowned and said that that was stupid. I took it off and put it in the back seat and the next morning it was gone. Later I felt so ashamed and sad. I shouldnt have said that, when it was within kitten’s ear shot…
When I picked it up off of the wet grass, it looked exactly the same as it had always looked. Except for one thing.. it looked much older. The green had faded a little bit and the frayed bits of yarn had turned white. It had grey hairs. It was old now too, like me, so we match again. I held it to my face and inhaled; it smelled like moss and snow. I cried and squeezed it’s pompoms, and streams of water poured out. Like it was crying too. I don’t really have many things, and this is one of my most favourite and important and I promise I won’t stop wearing it. Even when I’m 100. You can bury me in my ridiculous green cat hat with it’s pompoms. I won’t be embarrassed of something I love so much, I promise.
Kara La La La 