Brey Willows

Card 19, Writing Down the Bones: Tell me about your mom’s hair (or someone else’s).

Oh, Grandma. With your beehive hairdo dyed midnight black, frozen in clouds of Aquanet. After losing you so long ago, your features have started to fuzz in my memory, but your carefully styled hair that you continued to get done right up to the time you died at 80…that I remember in detail.

And it never changed. After you got out of the military and started your forever lifestyle of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers type parties and love-loss, that hair style was yours. There are no pictures where it’s any different. Did you not want to change it, ever? Did you never think about it when the stick thin, iron straight long hair was in style? Did you never want bangs?

Black bouffant. Red lipstick on reed thin lips. A shrewd gaze. Tanned, leathery skin you always loved. You hated it when you couldn’t wear heels anymore. You hated it when your hair went flat in the hospital–never mind the aneurism. Fix my hair.

Funny. I’ve never changed my hair style, really, either.

As an adult it’s always been long, and frizzy, and sometimes naturally curly. But the style itself has remained consistent. No, I’ve never wanted bangs. No, I’ve never wanted to dye it various colors. No, I’ve never wanted to see what I looked like with it short (a potato, would be my guess). And it’s the only part of me I like. I wonder if that’s how you felt too?

It was the generation in between us with all that courage and spontaneity. Every color, every cut, never worried because she knew it would grow out and she could change it again.

But you and I missed that bit. I wonder how alike we might have been in other ways, had you not been…well, you.