Mom's Straw Hat

I will be 69 years old this month and my age is beginning to bother me. I have always been an attractive, independent woman and I have taken a certain amount of pride in the fact that I have aged well and remained attractive even if less so than before. This year the aging process has begun to increase exponentially and the lines and crevices creep in anew each day. I believe that is God's mercy as He sets our bounds to become childlike once more. This is a year when I have also missed my mother more than ever. Strange isn't it how we miss someone we never really knew.

She was a very attractive woman with a full volumptious body and secretly proud of her breasts. My father was always considered a lucky man to have found such a lovely lady. If you asked her friends about Dorothy they would say many things but most would say she was always a lady.

When Dad died at 54 they had been married for 36 years...she was only 15 when she became pregnant by the handsome soldier from Fort Riley who swept into town one Saturday night and swept her off her feet and eventually away from the small, Kansas rail-road town where she grew up.

But today I am remembering my mother in the last years of her life. She was not attractive any longer...she had become bitter, angry and sad and it showed. She had been a widow for 35 years and not a happy one. But every once in a while she was so cute. I am thinking about a day she came to my house with my sister. I walked to my back door and watched her walk up the ramp in a new, straw, garden hat securely fastened uner her chin. She had by now obtained the old people shuffle but that day she fairly flew up that ramp with her light, little steps holding on the rail to steady herself; her eyes glinting with satisfaction and pride as she neared the door. I was so caught up in how cute she looked and how glad I was to see her that day... I laughed out loud with the joy of it.

Her hat hangs in my closet. It is precious to me.