Try it on: This is where it’s hat

A few old ladies still wear hats to church; mine last Sunday, in fact, netted two compliments although I’m not sure why since some of the fur was worn pretty thin on the pillbox I’d bought years ago in a secondhand shop. I only wear this particular fur hat when the temperature plummets. It reminds me of Siberia.

That’s where many of my hats came from, not Siberia, but from thrift shops or yard sales or vintage-clothing stores. For the life of me, I can’t recall the origins of several of my prized hats, including a wide-brimmed purple felt I often wear at Eastertime despite the inconvenience to folks seated in the pew behind me, and a gray, Stetson-shaped one that has a scarf attached for under the chin, like something Katharine Hepburn would have worn. Where those two hats were purchased I can’t remember, it was so long ago they appeared on the closet shelf.

In my next life, I intend to be a milliner, so crazy am I for hats and caps, straws and wools, in every style from homburgs to berets, notwithstanding the humiliation some examples of my headgear have brought to my offspring who figured their mother was the original Mad Hatter.

They have never understood a hat’s effect on me, such as the dark green fedora with a shiny feather on one side, handed down by a dear friend who claimed she didn’t look good in it. Maybe I don’t either, but I surely feel good in it, as if I’d marched into a New York haberdashery and paid lots of green for it.

When my mood fits, I wear a funny wool tweed cap that I’m certain Sherlock Holmes wore. It has two bills so no one can tell whether I’m coming or going, or at least that’s part of the mystery. Maybe it’s not Holmes at all but Elmer Fudd.

I have a black wool derby with a chinstrap I like to wear when jockeying into position, so to speak, and a black leather helmet hat that would grace any Harley. An elderly aunt gave me a deep purple, crocheted skullcap I could imagine wearing to a bar mitzvah, and there is a tan safari hat right out of Africa. I have a gray, wool cap I wear when I want to feel British, and a black beret when I’m thinking Parisian.

For Christmas a friend gave me a dapper fleece hat lined with soft wool that makes me think of yodeling in the Alps, or at least sitting through “The Sound of Music” for the umpteenth time.

I still have my mother’s straw hat she wore when fishing with a cane pole from the side of the lake, as well as a baseball cap that says “Grits” on the bill for “girls raised in the south.”

Someone gave me a sparkling red, white and blue sequin-stitched cap to wear on the Fourth, and someone else, a captain’s hat to sport on the boat. I’ve a military-issue khaki hat for wearing in the woods and an antique blue velvet hat for dressing up.

That’s not to mention the wool tousle hats, or beanies, for this frigid time of year, or the colorful canvas caps for warmer days ahead, one such baseball hat featuring a lime-green martini, straight out of The New Yorker magazine.

And speaking of publications, readers of this Style section can’t say the columns aren’t heady. Right here is where it’s hat.