Zinc hair salon, Dublin last Summer
Slightly Bemused writes:
So, as the Erc Carmen song went, I ran a comb through my hair. This morning, I had snarls. I did not think my hair was long enough for snarls, and certainly it is short enough that they were easily dealt with.
Now, her Little self has longer hair, and she had snarls. She would not let me help, as she said she needed to feel them as she freed them. Makes sense to me. But whether related or not I am still finding strands of long hair about the place. And before anyone asks, yes, I did clean and hoover. I think though that these are like the pine needles off a Christmas tree. No matter how hard you try, some will still turn up in July.
She had to clear the shower drain several times while here. While I did my best to keep it clean, snarls of hair were never the problem.
Where I work is at a hospital. I am not clinical staff, at best I am support, and I will do my best to support. But one of my jobs has me randomly walking about the building. On one of those days, I crossed paths with a nurse taking to an older lady, who would be about my mother’s age. They were going down to an empty room so the lady could get her hair washed, and combed. A seemingly simple thing, it was about restoring the dignity to the lady. The remnants of her auburn locks were visible even before the wash.
It reminded me of my own mother, and hers. My Grandma, for all the time I knew her, had white hair. Not silver, white. And my mother once told me that she always wanted white hair like that. She never dyed her locks, but as her younger sisters grew grey and some added colour to retain their honestly youthful looks, my mother’s hair stubbornly did not change, and for so many years retained the kind of lightly reddish brown that I also ended up with, after apparently having very white blonde hair as a child. My Dad’s was much darker, and a brother and sister in particular ended up with his very dark black hair. So we were all of us either slightly auburn, or very black.
And over the few too short months she was here, my Little one’s hair grew out. The remnants of the colour she had put in it cleared, as it does, and underneath her original colour returned. A colour I see in the filaments I still find around the house. A colour that reminds me, every time, of her grandmother. My Little one, looking at the photos, wanted the black from my father, with whom she was very close, but she got me. And she got her Grandma.
Slighly Bemused‘s column appears here every Wednesday.
My Granny Chainsaw dyed her hair until she died, making it in to her late 90s and I never saw her with any grey/white hair and she always loved getting her hair done by a relative who was a trained hairdresser and visited regularly to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed… which was no less than she deserved.
On the other side of the family, Mammy Chainsaw has relatives that were snow white in their early 20s the prospect of which horrified me in my early 20s but now I’d be thrilled to have white hair, rather than the blah salt and pepper that exists under the Loreal box job.
This is like something someone with dementia would post on Facebook. Navel gazing, barely readable gibberish.
No time to dye, mate.
That made me laugh!
:)
and a Happy New Year Slightly
And to you, my lady, and all of yours