Hat Hater

I don't know what has happened to my head of late. I don't mean my brain, which is no more addled than usual, but my actual head, noggin, bean, kopf, tete. I simply cannot wear a hat any more. This especially apples to headgear of the winter variety. I do all right in the sum me, with my Tilley hat, or various sun hats that I keep around to work in the garden. It's these winter hats.

I don't think my head has grown. I have always had a rather small head. I know that when one gets older the ears grow, which is why so many of us older ladies keep our hair long enough to cover the massive things that seem to practically reach our shoulders. (Old men have hair growing out of theirs; we women get the Basset hound look.) However, my head seems to have gotten bigger in some way.

Certain hats will not stay down, popping right off my head. If I pull them down, I get that bag lady look, the street person mumbling to herself look. If I try to tie my scarf around my head it slides off the back. No matter what I do, if it isn't popping off or sliding down, everything bunches up at the back of my neck causing me to walk funny and making me have to turn clear around to see anything off to the side.

Yesterday was the first really cold day of the late fall and I had to wear something on my head or risk having my ear lobes freezing and breaking off (which would have been a painful solution to the growing ear problem) and I just walked around feeling trapped and furious about my hat. Maybe I experienced some kind of birth trauma, like getting my head stuck in the birth canal and that's what hats on top of and sliding off my head remind my psyche of.

And then, too, yesterday reminded me that this is the beginning of all that cold weather stuff.

I realize that the world situation and economy are not good and that I should be worrying about that instead of my non-hat head, and that I am lucky to have a head at all and warm hats to not wear on it. Well, I'm just not Pollyanna and some things are just annoying. Really.