AMY KIRK: Husband can't have too many hats

• Amy Kirk

Amy Kirk

Talk about it

Some women have an addiction to shoes. Their closets overflowing with a wide variety of colors, heel heights and seasonal trends in footwear. No matter how many pairs they own, they’re always on the lookout for another pair. Often, their men don’t understand or appreciate their passion.

I can relate to a man’s annoyance with his wife’s personal shoe shop. My husband has a fetish for hats. A summer straw hat, two caps and two other hats (one of each for work and special occasions) are not enough to satisfy him.

Most of them are collected in three stacks on top of the gun cabinet: straws, caps and felts. But they exist in nearly all the other rooms as well.

Some of the cowboy hats are black felts, others are silver bellies, and he has a brown felt from his childhood (to his credit one belongs to our daughter and one was his granddad’s). His summer collection consists of four varieties of straws. I’ve never taken time to count the scotch caps, and we haven’t even covered the stack of ball caps yet.

Felt hats are spendier and take longer to break in, so I guess I should be thankful he draws the line somewhere. It just seems ridiculous to me that once winter is over, he and my son are soon wearing different straw hats from the new “spring collection.”

Regarding the stack of caps, he has the freebee dealership’s hats, gift caps from friends or relatives, hunting season caps, and “bought-on-a-whim” caps. I had no idea how particular he is, either. He prefers a certain style. If he gets a cap that doesn’t fit the criteria, it doesn’t get ditched, but stacked.

I have yet to see him get rid of any caps voluntarily. I’ve suggested recycling them in the shop, and I threatened to decorate or create unique gifts from them. Those are fighting words. He’s possessive of his collection and his tight-hide nature doesn’t allow him to give or throw anything away. He knows their worth or what he paid, thus an investment’s been made. If I try getting rid of them behind his back, he notices and we argue over why he bothers to keep them. When I get tired of looking at the “stacks” and my frustration is maxed, I sort off the ones he doesn’t wear and haul them to the shop bench. This way I’m not accused of getting rid of them and I don’t have to look at them. Days later, they’ll be hanging from the rafters of the shop.

Cowboy hats, on the other hand, don’t hang that way as easily, so until I find a solution, I get to watch the cowboy hat stack grow.

Our poor son is even getting sucked into this hat hoarding habit. By the time he was 10 years old, he had 14 caps, four straws and three felts.

One day their hat collection will be considered “vintage.” Then they’ll really be worth something. Maybe I can retire off the sales from the auction I plan to have of the hat stacks. Like he says, “everything’s for sale” especially when a profit’s involved.

Amy Kirk and her husband raise their two kids on a fourth-generation cow/calf operation near Pringle. She blogs at ranchwifeslant.areavoices. com.

Tags: amy kirk, life, updates, columns