My Grandmother's Navy Pillbox

This navy blue pillbox is the last of three hats I inherited from my grandmother, another of the  wardrobe basics I talked about in My Grandmother's White Pillbox. It's navy wool with the minimal (but cute) decoration of three pearls. I wore it when my mother was visiting, hoping that she would remember Grandma wearing it. She didn't, unfortunately. 

She did share other memories with me during her visit, though. One was the story of Grandma looking for work in the Great Depression that I included in My Grandmother's Cello Straw Hat. She also shared memories about her own life.

We went to the coast one day, and she told me a story I'd never heard before, about how when she was quite young her family and my Great Aunt Esther's family used to vacation every summer at the beach. They'd get cabins side-by-side and spend a week on the Washington coast.  She said it was during the Second World War, and the Americans had deployed troops on the beaches in case the Japanese attacked. The soldiers would whistle at my young, attractive Great Aunt Esther.

But my mother's strongest memories were of going clamming. Her parents would wake her and her brother up early, and they'd go out to the beach to dig clams by flashlight. "It was so cold," Mom said, "cold and dark." She doesn't remember having a lot of fun at the beach, just the miserable clamming. Her mother would make clam chowder, but from Mom's tone of voice, she hated the clamming more than she loved the clam chowder. 

She enjoyed our trip to the ocean where she could bask in the warm October sun, eat a turkey sandwich, and watch the ocean from the bluff, not a clam in sight.

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Mom and me

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