Of All the Hair Salons in the World, I Walk Into Hers

I am very unfussy about my hair. I wash it. I don't own a blow dryer. I don't even own a hair brush. A comb seems to do the trick. I don't color it. I don't style it. I might be delusional, but mostly, I think it looks fine.

I used to set it on giant pink plastic rollers when I was in high school so it would be smooth and straight-ish. By the end of my freshman year of college, I began to let it do its own weird and wavy thing. Oh, and after I went gray in my early 40s, I had it colored for years. A base color, highlights, and eventually an intensely detailed weave so I was more blond than gray. When The Someone dumped me for a woman 20 years younger, I gave it up.

Nowadays, I prefer to think of it as silver rather than gray, but lately something's been going haywire (that IS the perfect word) with the texture. While I do confess to cultivating my beach crone look,  the witchy texture was too much, so yesterday I went to a salon on the spur of the moment and got worked in for a gloss job. I knew there was such a thing as lip gloss, of course, but now my hair has a coating of gloss, too. I do think it's shinier and less witchy.

BUT, here's the amazing thing--even more amazing than shiny hair. The stylist is somewhere around my age (or something close--or a little younger, probably) and her fiancé died rather suddenly a year and a half ago. I'm not even sure how this came up, but you know, when you go to a salon, you just end up making conversation. There were many similarlities in our lives and in our losses. We connected in so many ways. So, I have shiny hair, and my heart feels a little shinier too.

She says that just recently she feels herself coming out of the fog. Like she's been on a raft in the middle of the ocean, lost. And now she's spotted land. She's not there yet, she says, but she's paddling toward it. I can't quite imagine it. But because she told me about it,  I believe it's possible.