Hats

I love them almost as much as I love shoes. While I wear the shoes I collect, I almost never wear the hats. --I'd put them on planning to wear them to top off my outfit, but by the time I got downstairs, I'd have a headache. So they'd end up on the hall table as I left the house. Yesterday, my fedora didn't. It drove all the way to Orchard Lake perched on my head to be my still life at art group.

As kids, my BFG and I shared big laughs together in millinery trying on hats. What we were really trying on, of course, were different personalities. I particularly liked the large "picture" hats with cabbage roses ala Scarlet O'Hara, while Geraldine preferred the finger tip veiled, cocktail types with jewels ala Audrey Hepburn. We were romantic young girls smitten by movies with the fabulous fashions of Edith Head.


Today, hats are a different story. I collect men's styles. I like the way I can cock them to the side or angle them low to shade my eyes. The most recent hat I bought was also a Stetson. I found it in the Tenaya Lodge gift shop outside Yosemite National Park while my grandkids shopped souvenirs. It is natural cowhide suede, a cowboy hat with a silver trimmed band. It's gorgeous. It's strokable. It's me.

This one, I wear--but not in the rain; it spots. I'm sure a real cowboy wouldn't care--might even deliberately wear it out in a downpour just to soak in some history, but I prefer to keep it as clean as the day it caught my eye. It too has been immortalized at art group and may even make it to Arizona someday where it's definitely going to draw envious stares from the town folk.