Of Hats and Herons
“Nice hat.”
It's the third time I've heard it —en route from Detroit to Alberta, via Minneapolis— and I’m not sure which hat my interlocutors have their eye on.
My battered Stetson? Surely not. Must be the coffee-coloured one I’m carrying in hand, a gift from my girlfriend Heidi to my mother.
It’s the kind of hat H herself favours, and a chapeau much complimented (and coveted!) by my stylin’ Mamá.
When I offered to reimburse H for the hat destined for Alberta she wouldn’t allow it, while also pointing out that I’d gifted a Blue Jays baseball cap to her father (as well as another to my own Dad [who suffers the Jays’ seasons alongside me]).
I’m deep within a cross-familial swirl of hatted significance, dear reader, a trans-oceanic economy of headgear-generosity, and I hadn’t even realised . . . .
<><><>
The Hat Thing has distracted me from the Herons —Great Blues and a number of the more elusive Greens H and I spotted not long ago near Lake St Clair in Michigan—
that I want to share before travel takes me over.
* photographs and watercolours by Kenneth Mills
If you enjoy Dispatches, please subscribe, leave a comment, and share to one and all.
Bravo! On all counts. Twine it all together with the fact that the herons (well, their cousins, the egrets) were some of the favorite victims of nineteenth-century milliners. Their beauty was often fatal!
Can we call you Heronymous Bosch?