Doesn't everybody name their hats?

It comes as no surprise that I like hats. I wear them year round, but it's especially fun to wear them in winter. With the approaching Polar Vortex 2, little brother of Polar Vortex, I will most likely be wearing a woolly hat indoors. It's good to have a proper cold winter. I've enjoyed Edna, my vintage poodle hat, named after my dear friend, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Not many wear them in my neck of the woods, so I get pleasant looks of surprise when I show up around town in wild vintage hats. It's no fun to dress without accessories. In 1950s rural Indiana, a woman dared not show up to church without her best hat, pocketbook, and gloves. My favorite thing to do in church, besides eating Grandpa's butterscotch Lifesavers, was to look for Margaret Mabbit, the woman with the feathered hat and bright red lipstick. When we rose to sing the doxology, she looked like a lovely Sendakian parrot, happily singing on her perch.

“What the hell is that?" I laughed.
"It's my fox hat."
"Your fox hat?"
"Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat."
"Why are you wearing your fox hat?" I asked.
"Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.” 

 ― John Green, Looking for Alaska 

You can't lie when you play with coal...

The boiler furnace at Willow Manor is going tapocketa-tapocketa-tapocketa, trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the Polar Vortex of 2014. A polar vortex is also known as an Arctic cyclone, or my personal favorite, frigid twister. Everyone's objective this week is to keep warm. Washing dishes the old fashioned way never felt so good. I'm actually typing this wearing gloves.

Boiler furnaces are becoming obsolete. I have come to love the nostalgic pop and hiss of the radiators. It's a steampunk thing. Grandma's house in rural Indiana had a coal-fueled gravity furnace. Coal was delivered by a truck that backed up to the house, and dumped the coal down the shoot into the cellar. When the temperature dropped in the house, she called for one of my uncles to go down and shovel some coal into the furnace.

I would tag along. Being a lover of stones and bones from an early age, I couldn't resist the beautiful mound of coal in the corner of the cellar. Grandma strictly instructed me to stay away, but I was compelled by the iridescence, the chalkiness, and even more, the satisfying crunch when you climbed on it. As careful as I was about not being seen, somehow she always knew. I guess you can't lie, when you play with coal.

As diligent as Grandma was about keeping house, the coal dust settled on everything. Things were simpler then, but dirtier. Think Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird; that was me. I had dirty feet, knees, elbows, and hands, year round; this was okay. Kids didn't have to be clean, except for The Lord's Day, when we were starched and spit-polished, until we were unrecognizable. My red Kool-Aid mustache never came off. I wore it like a tattoo.