A screen door slams, interrupting my dismal mood, and an impatient mover walks into the room. “Does this box go on the truck too?”

It is an old hatbox, faded and shabby with age. Upon seeing it again, pieces of my past leap to life and before I know it, I am swept back in time.

It is the early Fifties and hats are in fashion. Dressing up to go almost anywhere means wearing Sunday clothes, white cotton gloves and always a hat.

I am twelve and Mama lets me pick out my Easter bonnet for the first time. Since I am on the cusp of teenagery, I fancy myself in a large picture hat that will surely turn me into a Lana Turner lookalike. Mama rolls her eyes and laughs.

“Twelve-year olds do not wear picture hats. They wear straw hats with little pink rosebuds on it and look like Margaret O’Brien in Little Women.”

I pitched a fit, but to no avail. We went to Yetta’s Little Hat Shoppe and bought a straw hat with rosebuds on it. After that day, hats began to signify seasons of growth in my life.

At fourteen, I learned to drive a car. I was in my Casablanca phase aiming for dramatic mystery and wishing I looked like Ingrid Bergman. I drove my daddy’s car all over town wearing a French Beret and feeling so grown up.

Heartbreak of first love ushered in another serious period. I cut my hair in a pageboy bob and wore a tam while trying my best to look as noble as Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda.

Eventually, I changed my hairstyle to the quintessential should-length flip and wore pink pillbox hats for my Jackie Kennedy Camelot Period. That was the year I voted for the first time, the year I became a woman.

The old hatbox dangling from the mover’s hand spirits me back to my hometown for Easter and allows me to gaze down the Main Street of my past: the hardware store window decorated with green artificial grass, the Easter Bunny pulling a wheelbarrow piled high with red garden tools, speckled malt balls on sale at the drug store and Easter Parade flashing on the marquee at the movie theater across the street.

Familiar faces from a distant past become etched in timeless clarity. The cop on the corner directing traffic, the town mayor slowly strolling down the street to his office, and there’s Old Blue ~ the street dog that belongs to everyone in town.

The clock outside the bank is chiming when I see my mother going into Belk’s to shop for fabric probably to make me an Easter dress. I climb the creaky, wooden stairs to the second floor of that department store and see her rubbing pieces of material through her fingers.

Returning to Main Street, I walk past the Five & Dime and fill my nose with the fragrance of freshly popped popcorn wafting out of the doors of the small store that sells everything from balloons to baby diapers.

An Easter Parade passes by complete with dozens of pastel-decorated floats and dozens of kids running alongside hoping to catch the hard candy tossed by the Easter Bunny.

I pick up a copy of the one newspaper in town and read that rummage sale to benefit the Red Cross is coming up, the Methodist minister is retiring, and a soldier’s homecoming is making headlines.

Memories of times I thought I’d forgotten so easily come back to me, and all from looking at that worn and weary hatbox. I remember being a Brownie Scout and my first Girl Scout uniform and the G.S. cookies I sold, the meals our family ate seated together around the kitchen table.

I could picture chalk-drawn squares on the sidewalk awaiting my cousin and me to play hopscotch. I remember how merchants in our town closed their stores every Wednesday afternoon and all day on Sunday.

Another look of impatience crosses the mover’s tired face. “Want me to toss this empty box or what?”

Suddenly hungry for home-grown simplicity and essential food for my soul, I shake my head no and return to the here and now. “That old hatbox is far from empty,” I tell him. “It holds treasures I can never replace.”

There is a hatbox in everyone’s life.