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Braided into my mind
(despite my girls' current looks: a short salon do
and the long not-so-blond but still-thick hair
pulled back in impatience)
are the hours spent coaxing tangles
with my fingers, making allowances for
tenderheadedness,
those hours of bittersweet togetherness,
pain sweetened by the eventual clean sweep
of the brush through the cleared locks
ready to be halved along a center part
then neatly divided into three hanks
for the classic under-over twist of the braid.
This careful and loving attention
(though was it the girls who were loved
or the good-girl old-fashioned effect
of two little blue-eyed blondes with long braids?)
in either case this memory calls to mind
the generation before them:
my blue-eyed brunette sister,
only four years old,
whose abundant and willful curls
were untamable at the best of times
but hopeless when older brothers
who should have known better
decided to entangle those curls around
a fist-sized ball of burrs.
Scissors were the only remedy.
Blog1: http://www.fastandfearlesscooking.com
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