The Cowboy Hat People

I try to avoid getting into gossip about my neighbors but I wanted to show you these crafts they made, so here we go:

Our neighbor's are always doing strange crafts like drawing Scooby Doo on those styrofoam plates you get when you buy a pound of hamburger at the grocery store. They are prone to having strokes and siezures so they live off diability and they are pretty bored. They will come over to our house just to show us pictures they took of themselves.

They made these dogs out of beads. We told them we would like to buy one for our son and one for our daughter. They made these dogs special for us: One boy and one girl if you care to look closely at the picture.

We moved into our house in February a couple years ago. We saw "The cowboy-hat people" around the neighborhood. They live right across the street from us. At first we thought they may be polygamists becuase they dress so oddly. They're not. It's a couple in their 50's and their 93 year old mother. In the winter they all wear leather jackets and cowboy hats everywhere they go. The hats have homemade beadwork draped all over them. In the summer they wear shorts and the lady wears a Tweety-Bird (looneytunes) sports bra and the man wears an unbuttoned shirt, letting it all hang out. They wear these clothes for days at a time. These people can't drive because of the siezures so they're always walking. They took out a cinder block wall with their truck and a field of sapling trees not too long ago. They are constantly telling us, "If you see one of us having a siezure in the street stay back and DON'T call an ambulance. We get kicking pretty good so we don't want you to get hurt and we don't want to pay for an ambulance. We get through them just fine." They love to shovel snow. They love to dig up tree stumps (which we also hired them to do two summers ago). They tell stories that make you think they are compulsive liars but the stories are always consistent from one of them to the next so they must be true. They will talk your ear off until you tell them you have to go. They tell you about how old the mother is, about the big tires on their brother's truck, about their plans to pave their driveway someday. Anytime they see you outside they will come and talk to you, breathing cigarette smoke all over your kids.

They've invited us over a few times for watermelon and such. They have one room that's pretty regularly filled with cat crap. Once, I gave them a ride in our car to a medical center to get their prescriptions and I almost died of the smell. If the lady stubs her toe or something, she'll say "Oh Peanuts!" if she does it twice she'll say, "Oh Peanut Brittle!" We have known them for two years, taken them to the grocery store, to the hospital, worked on eachother's yards and they still think that my name is Eric and that my wife is Lanore.

They are pretty snoopy but very kind. We like them even though they can be embarrassing. They take some getting used to. They freaked out my brother-in-law just by being themselves. When I told them we were expecting our third child they told me how they always thought about adopting... "You know, just one kid. Like a four year old... but the state only gives us so much money and we don't know that we could afford it."

When a giant limb fell off of our dead tree and onto a city truck and out into the street, they came running with saws and axes as fast as they could to clear up the mess. When we ordered the sod for our front lawn, they came over and just started laying it like we had asked them to, even though we didn't. Anyway, it's just another example of very strange but very kind people.