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Saturday, May 27, 2017

Memories Woven in Hair

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.

 

 
Copyright © 2017 Ann Tudor
Blog1: http://www.fastandfearlesscooking.com
 
 

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