The Cart Ladies of the Cobblestone Inn

Hey y’all! I don’t know about you, but all this political chatter has me feeling like I’ve been run over by a whole parade of campaign buses. Folks in town are so riled up they’ve stopped speaking to each other. The gossip chain’s broken down so bad, poor Aunt Betty’s been left gossiping to herself in the mirror.

I've been traveling a lot lately - it's my busy season, you know. I was out doing another show - or?spreading the gossip further?as the folks here in town like to say. And I was in the middle of nowhere, stuck in a little hotel between corn and more corn. There wasn't another house in sight. I drove for hours to find it, and didn't even see one gas station. Not one human. Not even a Dollar General.

So I'm far away from home. And I'm feeling kind of lonely - wishing I had someone to talk to because I was at that point where I had talked to myself for so many hours that I was starting to argue back. I'm sitting in my hotel putting on my makeup - got about half my face done - when I hear this booming knock on the door. Scared me half to death because I have this secret fear that somebody is gonna break into my hotel room and have his way with me, and after I get through beating him with my curling iron, security is going to come in and find me with only half my makeup on, and there's gonna be all kinds of people at the crime scene, staring at me, asking me questions, and taking pictures of me with half an eyebrow and white lips. Yeah. It's these things that scare me when I'm not worried about world peace.

So I jump up and answer the door because I'm so bored I'm thinking maybe even the criminal on the other side might be up for a little chat before he robs the thirty dollars in my purse and takes one look at my chin hair and decides I'm not worth the trouble. So much for the self-defense class I started to watch on Youtube. I open the door and there's the giant housekeeping cart blocking out all light - the one with the squeaky wheels that I heard coming from down the hall. Surrounding the cart are three ladies who are smiling from ear to ear like they were posing for a photo. I think the ring leader was kind of deaf because she screamed "Housekeeping!" at me like she wasn't sure I could have put the clues together. "Can we get you anything?" she shouted.

"Yes," I replied sweetly. " I would like a smaller butt."??She turns to her cart as if to grab another coffee, and then freezes. She looks at the other two ladies who are still smiling but having trouble processing this disruption in their routine. "You want WHAT?" she says, in a rough raspy voice that sounded like it had been no stranger to filterless Camels. I smiled and repeated, "I would like a smaller butt" - thinking that my joke was losing steam quickly, as jokes often do that require repeating.

"Well, so do I!" she said with a wink, and with that, all three of them howled with laughter that surely could have been heard down the street, had there been anything down the street but corn. I joined in their laughter, and we began a litany of self-deprecating body part jokes that only women who are secure in their bodies can do.

"You're pretty," said one of the shy ladies in the back, which shocked me because I was pretty sure I had three quarters of an eyebrow drawn on, and false eyelashes on only one side. I explained to them that they shouldn't be jealous because without all this makeup, I looked like a mannequin head. We howled in laughter - the bent over kind, that just grabs at your soul and forces out a little pee.

We stood in that hallway for the most precious ten or fifteen minutes of my life. Laughing. Them pointing out my accent. Me pointing out theirs. Talking about how pumpkin season is here and which camp are we in - the lovers or the haters, which turned into a contest on whose house had more crap stuffed in it, which somehow turned into whose kid was more ungrateful. I won.

It got to the point where I was worried they would get in trouble for taking so much time with me, so we came up with an emergency "spill" excuse and how they had to help clean it up, and not one of us felt bad about lying.

We hugged each other over and over, promising to find each other online. My arms were full of coffee packet trinkets of love. But not as full as my heart.??As they shuffled off down the hall, I waved goodbye to the cart ladies of the Cobblestone Inn who, without knowing it, had restored my faith in humanity. These queens of the trial shampoos, whose stories had been shared with me, illustrated by their colorful array of tattoos, had walked up with a cart, but walked away with a crown - just proving that there is still good in the world. And sometimes when you're lonely, somebody will flat out come knocking at your door. You just have to be brave enough to answer, even if you only have half your eyebrows on.

It's a short life people. Too short to go through it angry at each other. Get that gossip chain back up and running.