The Sphinx's Sunday Hat

Every morning at seventy-eight, I follow the same ritual. The **vitamin** bottle on my windowsill catches the morning light, scattering rainbows across the kitchen table where my elderly cat, Barnaby, sits like a miniature **sphinx**, watching me with golden eyes that have seen nearly as many winters as I have.

He was my daughter's cat originally, a gift when she left for college. Now she's forty-five with children of her own, and Barnaby has been my constant companion through twelve years of widowhood. Some days I think he knows more about my private sorrows than anyone.

Today, I find myself in the attic again, looking for the old photograph album. Instead, my hands find something else: my grandmother's Sunday **hat**, stored in its original box since her death in 1985. The navy blue straw feels surprisingly sturdy, the silk flowers still bright despite forty years in darkness.

I remember wearing this hat at her funeral, how strangers whispered that I had her chin, her way of standing very still while the world rushed past her. She was our family's sphinx, full of proverbs and riddles she refused to explain. "Some questions have no answers," she'd say, smiling mysteriously.

The hat releases her scent—lavender and something else, maybe the peppermint drops she always carried. I'm suddenly eight years old again, **swimming** in the old quarry hole with my cousins while she watched from the shore, parasol opened against a sun that seemed eternal then.

"Don't fight the current," she called out. "Let it teach you where to go."

I sit among dust motes and memories, understanding now what she meant about letting life carry you rather than struggling against it. Barnaby appears in the attic doorway, creaky like me. We sit together in the quiet of old things, and I realize I'm becoming the sphinx myself—the keeper of stories, the one who knows that love is the only vitamin that truly sustains us.