I remember when she got it. I think I was nine and we were on a ski holiday in the Swiss Alps. It might seem a strange place to buy a green hatbox, but when she bought it, it housed a hat and I’m pretty sure that at that point, she was more interested in the hat than the box.
The hat was white with lace and frills and a wide brim to protect from the sun. I remember it because when she bought it she loved it and I absolutely didn’t. We were skiing in an area that had a town that also posed as a fancy shopping destination. All sorts of watches, clothes, sunglasses, outdoor apparel and sporting goods glittered behind street-length windowpanes. As a child, I gave no thought as to price and status afforded by buying articles from any of these shops, but I realize now that the hat she bought that came in its own hard green hat box, fitted especially for it’s protection, must have cost mum a little bit extra.
The day we bought it must have been too snowy to ski, and so we spent it in town instead. I remember a long day hauling ourselves in and out of shops and at the end of it we took the local taxi transport up the hill to our private chalet apartment. The taxis were skinny in order to fit the narrow and winding streets, and we could generally only fit our own bodies and maybe a small purse inside the seating area. All other baggage was thrown - or, in the case of mum’s new hat inside her hatbox, carefully placed - on the luggage rack on top of the taxi. There were no straps holding any of it in, which is why, I suppose, it fell off during our short but steep journey up the mountain.
The roads were slippery with ice, and curvy instead of straight up or down, weaving back and forth across the mountainside. Picturesque wooden chalets and apartment buildings dotted the hillside the whole way up. We made it a little over halfway up the hill when we hit an icy patch. The taxi slid, stopped, and then slid backwards ever so slightly before stopping firmly at a sideways angle. The driver muttered something in a language I didn’t understand, and then hopped out of the car. We watched, me with my nose stuck up against the cold, grungy window, all of us looking a bit worriedly after him as he ran off back down the street, leaving us sitting in the taxi. We sat there for about five minutes, which was just enough time for mum to consider getting out and walking the rest of the way up the hill with my sister and I and our shopping parcels, when we saw him running back up the twisty hill towards us, an old apple box in his hands. When he got closer, we saw that the apple box was filled with gravel, which he then strewed under the taxi. Once he’d covered the icy street with the gravel, spraying it under the tires, under the vehicle and all around it including the steep bit ahead of it, he tossed the apple box onto the passenger seat, gunned the motor and we felt the tires grab hold of the gravel and lurch suddenly forwards and upwards.
This sudden lurch is what tossed the hatbox off the top of the taxi. We heard it thud on the ice behind us, forcing the driver to once again mutter something we couldn’t understand, stop the vehicle and jump out of his seat. The expression on mum’s face as she watched him run down the hill behind the taxi to grab hold of the hatbox, which was slowly sliding down the hill, and then return to the taxi to fasten it more sturdily on top, was one close to what one might look like while watching a horrible scene on TV.
We made it back to our chalet in one piece, as did her hat, which she insisted on wearing inside for the remainder of the winter ski holiday despite its being a typically summer-looking hat. I don’t recall her wearing it much that following summer, nor any summer or indoor-winter holidays in the years after that. The hatbox did suffer a rip in its thick green fabric and a dent that bent inwards like an old lady’s puckered lips along the corner that hit the ground.
The whole time afterwards that I lived in that house, the injured corner protruded from the top of mum’s closet like a childhood scar, and I never gave it a second thought. Until now. Strangely, it is only now that I am thinking about it again from this safe adult distance that the thought of that scar also triggers another memory from that day. A memory that should have been long forgotten, erased as if on a floppy disk gone out of style, but nevertheless is still there.
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