Merritt came home Saturday afternoon and announced that he’d found the missing stocking cap.

We’re always losing hats, gloves, coats–they get left one place or another, and eventually make it back home to the laundry basket. So while this may not sound like such an unusual find, let me share with you the history of this particular greenish gray-colored fleece stocking cap…

Whenever I needed a stocking cap, I usually borrowed this hat from my husband. He always wore his red Helly Hansen beanie. This stretchy fleece Lowe Alpine stocking cap fit better over my hair. But for some reason which has long escaped my memory, Merritt was wearing “my” fleece stocking cap last summer (probably early July) when he was raking the barley hay. He got warm as the sun came up, and stashed the hat somewhere on the tractor…never more to be seen (or so we thought). In vain he kept an eye out for it while baling hay and picking up the bales. We were sure it was long gone. I even bought a new grey Carhartt stocking cap (just as warm, I’m sure, but not quite as comfy, not being my husband’s hat and all).

Imagine the surprise when in Merritt’s third or fourth discing of the garden last week, his hat (literally) turned up with the dirt. He rinsed it off quite well before bringing it home to me in a semi-recognizable state. One run through the washing machine, and it looks nearly as good as new–just missing three little felt tassles.

But how did the hat get from the barley field to the garden? So far as we can trace it (without the hat being able to talk, you know), the story happened like this…

The poor little hat fell off the tractor into the windrow of barley hay on that crisp summer morning, and was baled up that night into a big round bale weighing around 1,000 pounds. Then the lonely, neglected hat waited until wintertime when our cows were fed this particular bale of barley hay that housed the little hat (who had been wondering all the time if he would be sold to someone else, or get to stay on the farm). The cows, of course, did not find this bit of fleece very delectable, and let it fall to the bottom of the feeder, or tossed it out into the muck. The feeder was dumped out and moved when the muck got too deep around it.

Maybe the feeder had been placed in the part of the field that was fenced in to become garden this year. Maybe the little hat found its way into the smelly manure (pardon me, fertilizer) pile which was then used in the garden. Maybe one of the cows found the hat and wore it proudly this winter, but then lost it while hiding it from Mason when he came out to feed them.

However it actually got into the garden, Merritt ran the tractor and disc over it numerous times before the little hat unearthed itself in the last discing on Saturday. If it hadn’t shown up then, we might have found it while planting corn. Or it might have waited to show itself when we cleaned up the garden in the fall. Apparently fleece doesn’t decompose very well.

Maybe we should have re-staged the discovery for an advertisement movie we could have sold to Lowe Alpine. Maybe I should send in the story and ask for a free hat. Or maybe I’ll just make sure my hubby wears it when he goes out irrigating in the cold. But no more losing hats while raking–they’ll be using the new tractor for raking this year, and it has an enclosed cab (and a heater)!

(I can’t find a picture of either of us wearing the amazing, self-resurrecting fleece stocking cap. But I’ll try to add a picture to this post of a favorite picture of Merritt and me from our courtship days, where he’s wearing his signature red hat which nothing can replace.)