The Mucros wool cap is a far cry from the one I bought in Ireland and lost. But it has its own legacy, that weird small coal town in eastern Pennsylvania. A place named after a Native American Olympic gold medalist, Jim Thorpe. A whole town named after a man to memorialize him. A pagan book store, a head shop, an Irish importer carrying wool scarves and caps like the one I lost. The one from Skibbereen. We do that, we buy mementos as tokens to the past. Then we lose and replace them but it’s not the same. This Mucros wool cap from that day in Jim Thorpe standing on the street when the sun came out and struck my face and stamped me with a memory affixed to that place. Like the pillbox hat from the south of France. The cowboy hat from Colorado. They are mementos, and when they go missing the memory snaps loose too. We are trying hard to belong here by collecting what we can, to remember where we’ve been. And use these things as waypoints in a journey, our own memorial. As if it’s proof we lived by what we saved. And hung our lives on hooks.

Categories: prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, prose