Body hair and slow grief...

I miss her, but at the strangest times.

I miss her when I am putting on my makeup and notice that I have a chin hair. I think of Mom, taking a pink Bic razor to the hospital to shave her chin, because how else can you give your mother a shred of dignity when she's had a stroke the morning her husband was coming home from the hospital?

Then, I look at the way the one remaining light bulb above our pink, fifties-era bathroom treats my two gray hairs like tinsel, and I think of her purple, fifties-era bathroom. I think of all the home-perm kits and shed tears in that bathroom and wonder, will I get the old-woman perm when my hair goes all gray or will it stay dark and thick like hers?

I look at my brown eyes and, at the thought that seventy five years might gain them the easy wisdom indigenous to hers, I finally like them.

Every time I go home lately, someone tells me, "your hair is getting darker." I pretend it's true, and that I am looking more like her, even though I know it's just greasy. (I use her baby powder trick so I don't have to wash it.)

I miss her when I'm cooking and singe my arm hairs. I may not have gotten the genes to burn my chest on the stove through two layers of polyester blend, but as for klutz and arm hair, I got 'em honest.

And I miss her at the end of this post, when by now all these stories of family and hair would have evoked the recounting of some Pennsylvania Dutch prank on the Evendale homestead involving the attachment of some part of a newly-slaughtered animal to some part of an unsuspecting uncle or sibling. I wonder what our kids will think of stories about her.

At the end of the day, what can you do but smile at the stories that somehow close the circuit of where you came from and where you're headed? Funny, how these things work.