Hats and Apples

The apple hat that Helen gave me has managed to surpass Hatty as my favourite hat, something I never thought would happen. Hatty, by the way is made of two long knitted tubes, one brown and one black, the brown set inside the black. I have never been entirely sure that Hatty is actually a hat, I bought it for $2 from a long gone op shop in King St in 1998. Sometimes I would wake up at night terrified: had I remembered to bring Hatty home? I would get up out of bed to check, the idea of having lost Hatty too horrible to contemplate.
By contrast, the apple hat causes me much less anxiety. And unlike Hatty, the apple hat connects with my personality somehow, I have often drawn apples in the margins of my notebooks during classes, for example. Perhaps it is because I have a fruit surname, but I feel that a leaf sprouting out the top of my head is quite natural.
Real apples are another story. No longer being able to bite into them due to a tooth disaster, requiring a precariously moored filling, I now have to eat apples by cutting off slices. Although this makes me feel ladylike, I miss the abandon of crunching into a crisp apple with a defiant chomp. Every time I chomped into an apple I thought of a line of Ted Hughes.
"Their bite is worse than a horse's – They chop a half-moon clean out."
Now with my new slicing method of apple eating I feel as if I am a Victorian maiden with nervous trouble, who spends three hours every day slowly eating her only meal, an apple.