The Cowgirl Hat

It's true that her personality changes with each hat change.


The Cowgirl Hat

It started with her taking my truck and my brother-in-law on a mission to find rocks. I shook my head at Donny, like he was a man being marched to his execution. I had to back the truck out because last time she backed the car out, she ran into a wheel barrow full of rocks and it fell and crushed a roof gutter for the new roof (which I thought was in a safe place on the ground away from the driveway until it could be put back on).

As soon as she put that hat on, she began speaking like she was a country girl and started humming country songs about being done wrong. I knew then we were in trouble.

"We're gonna build this here garden wall," she said. "And you all are going to help."

I ran back in the house while Donny looked out the back truck window with his eyes as wide as cue balls as they drove away. I was going to call him on the cell phone and tell him to knock the hat off her head so she would stop being a cowgirl, but I knew he could never do it. We're big men, but we are at the mercy of our women: his sister who is also my wife, recently retired, and there is no escape from a woman with time on her hands. She had taken over our outside domain.

I waited for what was coming. They returned with a truck full of cut rocks from Lowe's, 114 of them. The tires seemed almost flat.

"How much do those rocks weigh?" I said.

"Eight pounds," she said.

I climbed on the back of the truck and picked up a rock. "This doesn't weigh eight pounds. It's more like twenty pounds."

"They told me eight pounds," she said.

I took one of the rocks in the house and weighed it.

"It weighs twenty-one pounds," I said. "I want all that weight off the truck."

Dorothy pushed her hat back. "Well, stud, you best get that truck unloaded or I'll lasso ya."

Donny smiled. "I'm building the wall with her," he said. "I don't unload."

"Lasso me? I'm gonna burn that hat."

So I unloaded all 114 rocks, something like 2394 pounds of them and saved my truck. Then, I went and hid in the root cellar all day. At the end of the day, the wall was built. Donny went upstairs and passed out from sun and exhaustion. 

She finally took off the hat and said: "Who built that wall?"

"I did," I said. 

"Where's Donny?"

"He slept all day upstairs."

(The hats must have a life of their own because she didn't remember who she changed into when she put them on. I thanked God for helping me.)

"Well, he can go to the soccer game with me tomorrow."

(Our grand-daughter had a soccer game in Milford, Ohio. The last time Dorothy went to Milford she got lost and ended up 50 miles north, but that is another strange story.)

So I get to stay home while my son-in-law works on our deck, and Donny gets punished for not working on the wall.

Won't he be surprised. We're gonna have to burn that hat.

The Wall of Doom