Hair, The Non-Musical

I was having a good hair day first thing this morning. Then the lady walking the portly dog said to me, “We’re getting two things done at once: having a walk and taking a shower.” Yeah, I had my exercise shower all right. Not even running at that point was going to save my hair. My hair was reduced to rags flattened against my head by the time I made it home. Then the sun came out. Of course.

I used to make fun of my mother’s hair, and then I inherited it. Who needs the Weather Channel when you have hair like mine? If seventy-five percent of my head is curling, that’s your chance of rain. If it’s mostly frizzy, then you’ll have humidity. On rainy days it curls; it makes proper, even curls, but only when it rains all day.

Rain water does wonders for my hair, as does ocean spray. Despite the wind, a day at the beach finishes my hair with consistent body and wave. I’ve often considered throwing out all forms of hair product and filling a spray bottle with seawater.

One day a lady stopped me to say what nice naturally curly hair I had. She knew it was naturally curly because no licensed beauty professional would set a perm like that, with half the curl doing what it’s supposed to do with purpose and placement, then another large wedge of hair flying up like it’d been absent from school that day.

People who lose their hair during cancer treatments can have their hair grow back very different than when it left them. That’s been my experience with motherhood. Of course I have two-son’s worth of gray hair. Everyone says boys are so inexpensive, but those folks don’t pay the emergency room bills. I earn those grays quite honestly. They are a mark of accomplishment and I don’t dye them. I’m going for the Eileen Fisher model look, except mine’s not silver; it’s gray.

When I had younger hair, I asked my hairdresser what color hair I had. I’d been in the grocery store looking at dyes to figure out what fancy name my hair color was called. My hair dresser told me that people with my colored hair usually dyed it.

The beauty, the splendor, the wonder….