Sex and Hair — Mostly Hair

Posted on March 17, 2004 in Reading

Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer is the first novel that I chose as my reward for finishing the last notebook. It’s about sex: sex involving moths, birds, coyotes, and, of course, people. No bestiality. This is a passage from the book that I enjoyed — especially given that I had my own hair cut last night:

She’d finished brushing out her hair. It cascaded down her back and shoulders and folded onto the porch floor where she sat, rippling all around her like a dark, tea-colored waterfall glittering with silver reflections. More silver each year, and less tea. She’d told her husband (ex- already by then) when he asked her why, that she was moving up onto the mountain so she wouldn’t have to cut her hair. Apparently it was a rule for women in their forties: the short, perky haircut. He probably hadn’t understood the joke, thinking it was some embryonic vanity on Deanna’s part, but it wasn’t. She rarely noticed her hair except to let it out of its braid for a run once a week or so, like a neglected hound. She just hadn’t liked the rule, hadn’t wanted to look her age, or any age. And who could be bothered with haircuts, weekly or monthly or whatever they had to be? Deanna actually didn’t know. She’d managed to live her life apart from this and most other mysteries owned by women. Eyeliner, for instance: what was the instrument of its application, did it hurt, and what on earth was the point? She’d never quite had a real haircut….The most she’d done in the way of coiffure was to untangle it from tree branches and trim the ends with the scissors on her Swiss Army knife. That was the only kind of woman she had ever known how to be, in Zebulon County and later on as a schoolteacher and attempted wife in Knoxville. Up here in the woods, finally, she could be the only kind of woman there was.

If you’re determined to remove your long shaggy locks, wait until you can give ten inches to Locks of Love.

I don’t know that I can keep my beard growing that long, but Lynn’s giving it a try by letting her scalp go.