Today I Am Free

Today I am free. The chains have been loosed, the bonds broken. My spirit sings and it soars.

Today was the first day since October that I went outside and did not wear a hat.

No, I am not exaggerating. I've had hat hair since OCTOBER, PEOPLE. It is not fun. But when you retain absolutely zero body heat like me, a hat is not an option but a necessity in this country, if you don't want to curl up in the fetal position next to a radiator and not move for six months. So I wear hats inside and outside. I even had someone at church ask me, whilst pointing towards my hat, "Does that thing ever leave your head?"

And so today, I felt like a woman newly freed from prison. A hat prison, if you will. A prison of having my head suffocated by the wool and polyester combos that make my hair look chronically terrible and give me dreadful dandruff and make it impossible to hear mumblers and have any sort of peripheral vision. Because OTHERWISE! Otherwise, without a hat, I would have literally frozen from the inside out. My blood would have turned into ice cubes starting with my brain and moving downwards. This is life without a hat in York. That would have been my life. Without a hat. In York.

So I wore the damn hat. Almost all day, definitely every day, I wore a hat almost everywhere.

But not today. Today I was brave, and it took only a moment to fling off my hat at the door. I said, "Goodbye hat! It is April! I do not need you!" The hat sat limply, quietly, on the counter, accepting its fate to be cast aside like the now-useless winter garment that it is. I did not look back. I marched into the gloriously rare sunshine and took a long walk, sans hat. I didn't freeze to death. I didn't regret it. I didn't miss my hat.

My spirit breathed. My soul was on fire. My head was hatless.

And my hair, given time and lots of tender loving care, may one day start to look less like the hair of a dirty man-Viking who has just taken off his helmet after battle and is combing his locks into a early-thirteenth-century-fashionable mullet for his reunion with his equally dirty woman-Viking lover. We'll see.

All in all, however, it's been a glorious day. A day to be celebrated. Life without a hat, I breathed. This. This is life. Today I am free.