Seattle Winter Headgear Again

'Tis the season again, of course, and I would be neglectful not to note at least a few of this year's variations on the knit-cap, or as it seems to be most popular here, the reservoir-tip-cap.  I noticed this phenomenon some time ago, but never have I seen it so consistently practiced as here in our adopted city of Seattle, WA.  I haven't been back home to Pennsylvania in winter for a very long time now, but even checking in on social media I can see that people living in more consistently extreme weather tend to wear their winter hats pulled down over their ears and what's more, without the the empty knob of hat on top.  Here however, perhaps because it gets but only so cold most winters, we tend to wear, at best, two thirds of our hats on our heads, the last third at least devoid of all but our deep thoughts.

Not the worst sort of sartorial silliness, I admit, this business of wasted space above our heads.  There certainly are all sorts of muffed ears and long-tailed caps, hunter's hats worn by bicyclists, and ski-gear sported by bus-commuters, and or with cotton cargo-shorts in all weather.  Just in the past couple of years the people that sell hats seem to have started making adorable baby-hats for grown-up heads, so that one may see faces above faces: kittens, and puppies, and raccoons and whatnot, and usually with long, dangling strings dandled down to snowball ends.  (I've noticed more mittens, strung and otherwise, on adults too.)  It's all rather painfully adorable, unless and until the wearer has clearly started paying taxes, and then it's just... embarrassing.

There are examples, I know, even here of actual knit from crown to brow.  Perhaps I simply don't see them as often, or simply notice them less.  But nothing quite draws my eye and curiosity so much as the exaggerated peak, tilted, tipping or best of all, straight-up as an exclamation-mark.  I wonder, like Lincoln's stovepipe, these Seattlelites aren't keeping something in there.  I don't know what it would be.  Certainly not the Gettysburg Address, from the look of 'em.  Maybe -- a latte?