There is a lady at my church who sometimes wears the most delightful hats — not the cheap-o ones you buy at Target, but beautiful, felted hats with pins and feathers and the works. They really are stylish, and she looks stylish in them.

And I had to say so, because… hats. Nobody wears hats like that anymore.

I have complimented her hats before, and she is always so very gracious. This time, she told me, “When I worked downtown at the First Security Building and had a bad day, on my lunch hour I would walk to a little hat shop on Main Street. It only sold hats, and had hats in every imaginable style and color. And I would buy myself a hat. And then I would walk back to the office, and I would feel much better.”

She told me that the hat shop has long since gone out of business, because hats like that have kind of left the vogue. Women just don’t wear hats anymore. I’ve looked for hats now and then, and stores mostly just carry caps or straw hats or visors (“I would only wear that kind of hat in the garden,” she told me). I mentioned that I had seen some nice hats at Nordstrom’s — and she asked me if I’d seen the prices. “No — but then a lot of the purses at Nordstrom’s didn’t have price tags. It’s like the people who shop there are the kind of people who don’t care what the price is.” She nodded.

And we talked about how the queen still wears hats — but then she was brought up at a time when all women wore hats.

“Well,” she said, “Keep looking, and one day you will find the perfect hat at the perfect price, and it will be yours.”

So I shall be hat shopping. 🙂