“That hat works either if you are three, or if you are eighty,” my son Max says to his younger sister.
Undeterred, Frankie lifts her twenty-five-year-old chin, and beams proudly like she’s walking the catwalk. Max’s wardrobe is more carefully curated than her (profoundly) more casual aesthetic.
Frankie is bananas about her new sunhat.
This weekend it presented itself, unstained and unexpected, at a garage sale. She didn’t even know she needed it. She likes the fine print flowers on the creamy background, the broad floppy canvas brim which covers the back of her neck, the price, and the loose drawstring under her chin.
She still has baby hairs along the edges of her hairline, which amuses her, now that she has peers who are having babies.
Her father Jake’s recent warm remarks about her maturing face she finds less endearing.
Frankie squats in our backyard, weeding her first vegetable patch which she planted with her partner. She sits between rows of kale, beets, leeks, lime green lettuce. Her knees are filthy. She pries a sharp knife into the ground, pulling out dandelions by the root, her hat covering her chestnut noggin.
I blurt out, “One day you are going to lose that hat!”.
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them.
I have put ink in her milk.
I had also tried to protect her by saying “Good luck with this first tiny garden; the rabbits will be all over it!”.
She planted it anyway, then flew off to work, to school, to a music festival, to their tiny apartment in town.
Every morning and evening Jake faithfully waters their vegetable patch with rainwater collected from our gutters.
Orange zucchini flowers peep out from under the canopy of green leaves that protect them. Curlicue beansprouts wind tentacles around stakes, seemingly overnight.
I sit with my coffee, jaded and disillusioned, non-gardener that I am, and rabbits pass by, circumnavigating her free produce aisle, shrugging at me as they scoot off to the neighbours.
My fears protected no one.
Perhaps she won’t leave her hat on a train.
Perhaps, aged eighty, she will pull it off the hook before going out to meet her more fashionable brother. Or she may bequeath it, faded, stained, to her great-grandchildren, or to random garage sailors.
For now, it is hers, a treasure until it is not.
Rosemary Leach paints, writes and cogitates in Almonte.
