CrossRoads Farm

Hair

13 April, 2005 - 8:17 am

When I was about ten years old my mom gave me a box of books, both fiction and non-fiction, she thought I might enjoy. I don’t know where she got them and many of them sat on my shelves for years, unread, until I gave them back or gave them away. One of them, however, still occupies a spot on the bookshelf here in the family room, “The Children of Odin.” I’ve read some of the stories in this book a dozen times. My favorite is the legend of Sif’s Golden Hair.
Sif, wife of Thor, has long blond hair that is her pride and joy. Loki, the god of mischief, cuts off Sif’s hair. Sif is distraught and Thor is furious, so Odin insists that Loki restores Sif’s hair to her. Loki appeals to the pride of the dwarves, the only beings capable of the task. The dwarfs take a brick of gold and beat it into threads as fine as Sif’s hair and as ‘bright as sunlight.’ Loki brings the hair to Sif and when she puts on the shining hair, it holds to her head as though it had roots.

I’ve had waist length hair all my life and this legend appealed to me. My hair certainly isn’t as bright as the sun, more like a dark blond/light brown. But when I hold strands of my hair up to the sunlight the highlights in it look like fine strands of gold. At least they have up until now.

I’m thirty five now and I’ve noticed two things happening with my hair. First, it is turning silver. Not gray – silver. D likes to pull out the strands that have changed and if you hold them up to the light they look like spun silver. That’s the good news. Not that I’m going gray - but that it is going to be pretty as it turns. It is inevitable, right? I may as well enjoy it.

The bad news is that has started to ‘thin.’ That is a polite, hairdresser term for ‘falling out.’ Not in big clumps or anything, I’ve just noticed much more stray hairs lately. When they started showing up in the food I knew I had to do something. I could cut it or I could start wearing it up. When we lived in Arizona I cut it short and kept it that way for the better part of a year.

I never got used to it. The only advantage was that it dried amazingly fast and I didn’t have to comb it. But when I looked in the mirror I didn’t recognize myself. When I mentioned cutting my hair to the Art Group, Dinah said they would have to check my ID at the door if I did that because they wouldn’t recognize me. Like Sif, my hair is one of the things that makes me ‘me.’ When Loki cut off her hair – he stole her identity.

So I have taken to wearing my hair in a loose braid all the time. It’s one of the first things I do in the morning now and I don’t take it out until bedtime unless I’m in the shower. It seems to be working. I don’t find hair everywhere anymore. The interesting side effect is that I can’t stand to have it down anymore. When I’m too lazy to put it up it drives me crazy – it’s like it has a mind of it’s own.

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