In the Beginning . . .

In the beginning . . . (or my first hair story)

Five. That's how old I am when for reasons beyond my comprehension I decide to give Sara - the little girl that lives behind me a haircut. Sara does likewise. We are at the glorious age where we have discovered our hair, a pair of scissors, a room where we have been left alone to 'play', and for reasons beyond our control an overwhelming desire to change our look.

Let me preface this by saying I don't remember the length of Sara's hair but I do remember that mine cascaded way down my back and happened to be that glorious color of little girl brown. You know the one where you spend a summer in the sun with those natural golden highlights evolving all on their own.

My mother screamed when she saw me (a sign that immediately let me know my look wasn't what I had expected) and she snatched the receiver from the phone to call little Sara's mom and give her a piece of her mind. To let her know just what type of havoc her little demon child had played. In response Sara's mom promptly marched Sara over to our back door step where she could turn her around for a little show and tell to illustrate where I had carved her head until she looked more like a wild pumpkin with bald patches than her former self. The moon had risen over the tree line and now reflected its light quite nicely off of Sara's head. My mother just said, "Oh, I'm so sorry." And that was the end of the mother wars.

My Aunt Kate of The Messenger of Magnolia fame stepped in, the ever ready hairdresser, to tidy up my locks while my mother was at work.

My mother screamed when she saw me. And then a sister fight started about why my hair had to be so SHORT! I looked in a mirror to search what was left of me with the eyes of an orphan. In the process of two major haircuts on successive days I had lost myself. The girl staring back at me was an impostor. Totally foreign. She looked a bit of tomboy - all pageboy and tree climber, fisher girl and skinned knees which was a bold-faced lie and I knew it. I was a tea-party, doll girl. A three stooges, Captain Kangaroo , TV watching rocking chair little girl. A book girl. A reading girl. That girl was not me. No sir. Most definitely.

And I swear to you that this is the truth - not too long after that a domino of bad things happened that might just be carved up to bad luck but they were so close to the bad hair that they all rolled together. Our house burned down on Christmas Day. We went to stay with my father in Germany where he was stationed. I was a Florida girl sentenced to years in the cold, grey, snow. My house was gone and so was my hair. Life was over as I knew it.

Looking back from a place of becoming an, ahem, adult, I can see that these things were surely, logically not related. BUT what I do know is this - dang if my good times and my bad times haven't somehow been torched, touched, and torpedoed by whether or not my hair was having a good year or a bad year. A year of great highlights or a year of perm-fried hair to perfection and dank depression.

Welcome to the world of obsessive hair stories. They all had a beginning somewhere. And so far, they've had no ending. So self indulgent and so superficial- I think I'll go visit a site linked here and make a donation. It'll be good for my soul. :)