I was jonesing for a new hat. I had started The Hat Project a month or two previously, and I don’t think it had really sunk in, how many hats I had, how long this project would take. Or maybe I’m fooling myself—I did know I had a lot more hats to wear and didn’t care: I still wanted a new hat.
 
Recently I had bought three ring hats in an auction lot at shopgoodwill.com. The lot included The First Yellow Ring Hat and the White Bonus Ring Hat. The yellow hat appeared practically unworn; the white hat was a little crushed, but that had been apparent in the listing. And they were so cheap! I was the only one who bid on them.
 
Buoyed by that experience, I started trolling the Goodwill online auctions. It was about a week till Easter, and though I didn’t think about it, it was the prime buying time for hats. I found a black hat I really liked, and it had one cent shipping (with Goodwill hats, often the shipping costs as much as or more than the hat itself). I bid a few times, but was continually outbid. Since I couldn’t inspect the hat’s condition in person, I was unwilling to pay a premium.
 
I looked around again and found another cute hat with one cent shipping, this blue and purple hat. I put in a bid, hoping this hat would not be such a hot item.
 
Alas, someone did outbid me. I raised my bid, and fortunately, my second bid was enough to win the auction.  
 
When the package arrived, I tore it open, then sat back, disappointed. The hat was a darker blue that it had appeared in the picture, was dusty, and worse, the feather shaft was almost broken—it was only holding together by the proverbial thread. The long part of the feather that emerged from the bow flapped with the slightest motion. 
 
It stopped being an exciting new hat and became a project. I brushed the dust from the hat and dabbed it with a barely damp cloth. Then I went to work on the feather. I tried to delicately apply glue to the nearly severed part of the quill and succeeded only in breaking it off completely.
 
Once the feather was broken, the job actually became easier. I could line up the broken piece with the rest of the feather, apply glue, and shove it under the bow, hiding the mending job. (I meant to take a before picture of the repair but completely forgot). And though I worried about my repair, the feather didn’t fall off when I wore the hat to church.

When I bought this hat, I thought I would wear it a lot. Like The Floppy Red Hat, it's a good hat for a cold but clear day, when you want your head warm but also need a bit of a sun shield.  It was made by the same milliner who made The MVP Hat. At first, I wore this black velvet hat often, especially in colder conditions.

So, what happened? I made the mistake of wearing this hat at a particularly bad time of my life. I had tennis elbow in both arms and wore braces continually. My arms were weak and painful, and I wondered how much longer I could carry on working on a computer keyboard. One cool evening I wore this hat while doing yardwork. I was picking up the fruit that had fallen off our big Santa Rosa plum tree in our front yard.

We were buried in plums, unable to eat as many as we had, yet I still felt I had to bring them in the house, where the majority of them rotted on the counter before I could do anything with them. A miasma of fermenting fruit pervaded the house. The tree hung over the sidewalk, making a sticky, slippery mess. I raked up fruit and hosed off the cement so passersby wouldn't slip and fall. I lugged armloads of smelly, half-rotten plums in the garbage. My arms were killing me and I felt close to despair. 

Of course, my situation improved. My arms got better with time and rest. A lady knocked on our door the following year and asked if she could trade flowers for our excess plums. She took them to make jam, and since she was a florist, gave me lilacs and gerbera daisies and Christmastime holly.

Yet, this hat still felt stained to me. Every time I looked at it, I remembered the dark time.

But when I started this blog, I said every hat.

I chose a particularly happy day to wear it again; a trip to the ocean with my visiting mother. And, we went to see sea otters, which I often do when feeling down. They are a sure-fire mood lifter. You can see them in the first picture, blurred out lumps in the ocean behind me. 

So now I can look at this hat, remember otters, and smile. And, in case you need cheering up, here's an otter video I took that day.

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.

As I wrote in My Grandmother's White Pillbox, I inherited three hats from my grandmother, all what you might call wardrobe basics. I could wear this lined straw hat with almost any dress in my closet. The only hint of the color is in the bow in the back, and I'm not sure if it is a very pale green or simply beige.

The hat body is woven from cello straw and (I think) raffia.  Cellophane straw, or cello straw, was an artificial straw quite popular in the 60s. I've never bought a hat made from it--it always seemed odd to me. Artificial straw made from plastic? Why?  But I think people liked the hint of shine it lent to summer hats.  Also, cello straw is sturdy. Many cello straw hats survived when natural straw might not have. My grandmother would have appreciated durability. 

My grandmother graduated from teacher's college during the height of the Great Depression. My grandfather, whom she was dating at the time, drove her throughout the area as she tried to find a job. But no one was hiring. After their fruitless search, they decided to get married. At that time, married women were not allowed to teach school (though married men were), so by marrying, she effectively ended her teaching career before it started. 

On the Sunday I wore this hat, I went home and after lunch taught English online, glad that times have changed, that I could not only work as a young single woman, but as an old married one.

​When I said I would wear EVERY hat, I wasn’t looking forward to stepping outside the house in some of them. I worried about the Green Feathered Hat and the Birthday Cake Hat, afraid they’d be too over-the-top. I wore those, and it turned out fine. Fun, even.
 
But I dreaded this folded cloth hat with the green veil above all others.
 
My friend Bea passed it along to me after being given it at a garage sale. Yep, it was the other hat in the bag with the White Free-from-a-Garage-Sale Hat.  In that post, I described this green veiled hat as “a bit odd.”
 
At first I wondered what had possessed a milliner to make it. Why pair an olive veil with such a weirdly beige off white? Was it made for a specific dress?
 
Then I realize that the hat must have faded drastically over the years. Sure enough, I pulled back the top layer, and underneath were the remnants of a green hat. 

It looks as if it might have even had multiple shades of green. In fact, this hat might have been pretty cool looking when new. Maybe something like this one on Etsy:

People sometimes tell me, “I wish I could wear hats,” or “I don’t look good in hats.” I say that it’s mostly about confidence. If you feel you look good in a hat, you will.  
 
It was hard to be confident in this hat. But I managed.

Back to The Hat Project main page. 

Once or twice a year, my church holds an outdoor service at the beach to celebrate creation and our duty to care for it. This year, the service coincided with the beginning of climate strike week, the special recognition of the crisis our planet is facing. Being at the beach that day made me feel especially keenly how much we have to lose--the blue ocean, the flying pelicans, the tough ice plant. As the service made clear, we have a moral duty to care for creation, regardless of political persuasion. 
 
The planet was really showing off its beauty that day. You can never count on weather at the beach. The last time we held a service there, it was cloudy throughout the morning, as you can see in the picture of me in the MVP Hat from that day. This time, though, the weather was so sunny and warm that I didn’t even need my denim jacket. I kicked off my sandals and strummed in the ukulele trio providing the service music.  This black ribbon and straw hat, which I bought at a department store years ago, had the perfect, relaxed vibe. 
 
As part of the service, we shared some meaningful times we’d spent at the beach. The pastor spoke about a time a pod of whales was so close to the pier that people were abandoning their cars on Highway 1 and running to the ocean to look. My husband described body surfing with his teenage best friend. I told how I'd grown up celebrating my birthday at the beach, about getting there early in the morning to secure a parking spot and a picnic table.
 
At the end of the service, as I was packing up my uke, people started calling to each other and pointing. Some whales had come in near shore, spouting white mist to the sky. I saw a flash of water-slicked back. A woman beside me gasped as she spotted a whale tail.

Maybe these whales will be the stories next beach church, when we again celebrate our precious planet. 

When I was in my 20’s, three women friends and I started taking each other out to celebrate our birthdays. We all worked together as technical writers at the same software company, and even when we went our separate ways professionally, we continued meeting.
 
One member was married, but the other three of us were single, and when we’d have dinner, we’d talk about the men we were dating. “Tell me if you think this is weird,” one of us would begin, and then describe what the latest guy was doing: brandishing a gun during a road rage incident, spending every weekend rock climbing instead of with his girlfriend, dismissing complaints that his cat made off with jewelry left on a nightstand. And the rest of us would confirm that yes, that was weird, or that yes, perhaps a person who behaved that way might not be the best partner for the long haul. It struck me even then how hesitant we were, as young women, to trust our own judgement. Women friends reassured us that our expectations weren't crazy. 
 
Then, all within the same year, the remaining three of us got married (not to those oddly behaving men).  We talked more about our jobs, about buying houses. About pets and growing kids. Two members started their own businesses. Two members went back to college for master’s degrees. And still we met four times a year to celebrate our friendship.
 
As the kids were moving on to college, our talk turned to the parents we were caring for as they aged or losing to their final illnesses. We also talked about our hobbies—concerts we performed in, books we read, vacations we took. At one point I mentioned that I had a huge hat collection, but seldom wore any of them anymore. “Wear one next time we get together,” they said. So I started wearing hats to some of our dinners.
​
First, I wore the Madame X Hat, though without a veil and embellished with a spray of silk flowers, my friends (all witnesses to that costume) probably didn’t realize it was the same hat.
​
​Around this time, my writer friend Sheila offered me some hats that used to be her neighbor’s. At that point, I was trying to limit my hat collecting, so I only chose three, including the Gray Mini Top Hat and this cute brown hat. Like the gray hat, I chose this one for the shape—I don’t own another with this squared-off front.

It didn’t start out this way. I saw this cute hat at an art fair. I really loved the fabric—even though it was a basic bucket shape, I thought the fabric made it look more sophisticated. (Though it’s reversible to a beige fabric, as with my other reversible hat, I only wear my favorite side). I used to wear this hat at a jaunty angle with a pair of dangly earrings.
 
But then, one day I was having a bad hair day. Maybe I didn’t blow dry it right or I bedheaded it taking a nap. And I thought, “I’ll hide it with a hat.”
 
This hat, because it covers so much of my hair, seemed perfect.
 
And it was.
 
It’s like one of those sad movies, where the aspiring artist can’t sell her serious work but discovers a knack for advertising art. Or the musician is born to play classical music, but the crowd loves show tunes. This hat was meant for so much more, but it’s such a great bad hair day hat that I forget to wear it otherwise.
 
“Nice hat!” someone will say.
 
“Bad hair day,” I sometimes reply.  But other times I just smile and say, “Thanks!”

​When I was a kid, I noticed three boxes on the shelf in my grandmother’s closet. They had clear plastic windows in the fronts, but I couldn’t see inside. I asked my grandma what was inside them. “Hats,” she told me. By then, hats had gone out of style, and I never saw her wear them.
 
My grandmother’s house was a trove of wonders for me, with its old-fashioned toys (who knew Borden made a board game starring cows Elsie and Elmer (of glue fame)?), its linoleum rug, antique wood-burning cookstove, claw-foot bathtub, and early-20th-century novels in fraying cloth bindings. Hats were the least of it. In fact, I never actually saw them, just their shadows inside those high shelf boxes.
 
Though she had a propane heater and an electric range, on cold mornings Grandma would kindle a fire in the antique kitchen stove against the damp Washington chill. Sundays she walked to the church on the corner. We kids would set up the croquet set on her mossy lawn and she’d play with us. She grew hollyhocks next to her back porch. She skipped rocks. A river ran through town, spanned by a wooden train trestle, and she’d walk with us down to the river, where the trestle’s creosote smell blended with the smell of damp sand and snake grass. In fact, though I have other pictures where she’s dressed more formally, this picture of her at the river is my favorite. Maybe you can tell from the photo that she had a sparkle in her eyes, signaling her stealth sense of humor. 

I miss her. Her birthday fell in September, and I always especially remember her this time of year.
 
After Grandma died, my mother gave me Grandma’s hats. “We thought these should go to you,” she said, handing me the three boxes that I’d forgotten until I saw them again, their hats still hidden in the shadows. I’m not sure what I expected—Grandma wasn’t rich and didn’t go in for extravagant display. When I finally saw them, the hats themselves were relatively plain. Wardrobe basics that she could wear with a lot of different outfits.
 
I put them away. They went from her closet shelf to mine.
 
When I started this project, I knew I would finally wear those three hats. But I kept hesitating. What did I want to say about her? How could I convey the person she was?
 
Then I got the pie dress.  I saw this dress online and, feeling as I do about pie (HUGE fan), I bought it. Grandma was famous for her pies. We looked forward to them every time we came to visit—wild blackberry and, especially, apple pies made from the yellow transparent apples she grew—soft, early ripening apples that cooked down into wonderful applesauce and pies.
 
So it felt right, in this, her birth month, in the pie dress, to finally wear one of her hats and write about her. And, if I didn’t say everything I want to say about her, well, I have two more hats to go.
 
Here’s a close-up of the hat. It’s white faux fur, its veil slightly misshapen from its years in the hatbox. My guess it it’s been 50 years since anyone wore this hat. I was proud to wear it, in honor of Grandma.

​I always thought of this light blue hat as one of a set of three. First I bought the navy and white hat, then the white on white hat, then this one. All of them date from the late 80s. This light blue hat was the last one I bought and the first one I stopped wearing.
 
Why? For one thing, it’s a little small. It fits, but it’s tight.
 
Also, at some point I looked at it and thought, “That looks like an old lady hat.” Something about that row of blue sequins made me think of white-haired women in powder blue suits. I was in my early twenties and I didn’t want that look.
 
But maybe I stopped wearing it because of the time I wore it to a wedding. Two friends of mine had a beautiful October wedding, on a golden fall day warm enough for a short-sleeved dress, but not hot. After the wedding, I was standing in the church parking lot with my boyfriend of a year or two, talking to the groom.  Because the bride was pregnant, they’d moved up the timetable. “I’m not marrying her because she’s pregnant,” the groom said. “I’m marrying her because I love her.” He looked so serious and so happy.
 
Then he grinned and lifted his eyebrows. “So how about…?” and he pointed at my boyfriend and me.
 
I was afraid to look at my boyfriend. I was thinking “I’m too young to get married.” It was a gut reaction, the kind that shows you exactly where you stand, even if you haven’t articulated it to yourself. In that moment, I knew I wasn’t ready to settle down with him. My boyfriend, though, was a few years older, and I worried that if I looked at him, I’d see that HE was considering marriage.
 
I don’t remember what either of us said. For all I know, my boyfriend was facing the knowledge that he didn’t want to marry either. Maybe he was afraid to look at me because he worried I’d be looking starry-eyed and hopeful.  

Eventually, that boyfriend and I did break up.
 
And sometime after that October day I put this hat away. 
 
Now, so many years later, I am getting to be an old lady. I'd happily wear a powder blue suit. When I took this hat out of the hatbox, I felt a little melancholy. The hat made me remember  that day when I was so young. Then, while we were taking pictures, my husband cracked a joke and snapped the picture as I laughed. And so I end this post with joy.