The Lady With The Purple Hat

When Wilma Richards died on a hot July day at the age of 89 her death had gone unnoticed by the world, and her body remained in the back of the storage closet of her store until people started to reported a foul smell coming from the building, and five days later she was found.

 

She wasn’t known by many, and no one knew when she had arrived to the small town of Windstone, it was like she just appeared one day walking slowly along the dusty sidewalk with a bright purple hat resting on her head, making her way down to the post office like she did every morning for the 50 years she had lived in Windstone.

 

And like the way it always works in Winstone, talk went around town about the lady with the purple hat and her strange habit. Stories of unrequited love, spies, and adventures went around town all centered around this mysterious lady that had shown up one day like an unexpected gust of wind .

 

I had met Wilma on a chilly autumn day morning, I was heading to school, and I remember that I had left the house late that morning and so I had been in a rush to get there. I saw her purple hat before anything else, at that age a frayed sort of beauty still held on to her giving her face a graying image of beauty. She had stopped me as I had walked past her, asking if I could help her with some boxes in her shop, I told her that I couldn’t help as I was already late for school but she insisted that it wouldn’t take more then a second looking at my watch and then back at her I decided being that I was already late it wouldn’t make a big difference to me.

 

After I had agreed to help she lead me to her shop, Great Treasures, which was a thrift shop filled with old clothes and objects. When I walked in I saw everything was neatly organized in shelved and boxes. She took me to the back room, all the while thanking me for helping her, she showed me three large boxes of books that she told me had to be moved to the front. She told me that these had been her husbands books and that he had been a soldier in  WWll who had gone missing in action. She had never lost hope of him returning and told me that she would check the post office to see if she wrote to her saying that he was coming home. The story had unraveled itself in front of me and a deep sadness settled in my chest.

 

That was the only interaction I had with Wilma, and with the years that followed I would still see her walking down to the post office, waiting for a ghost to return. When I heard of her death and the circumstances of it, all I could think about was her body laying among st boxes and piles of things, in the same room I had been in all those years ago and how incredibly lonely that women must have been in those last moments.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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