The Hair Wreath: Part Two

[Click here for the first installment.]

Listening to that afternoon's talk underneath the keyboard of the piano, I expected they would get busy immediately, the same as they did when it was time for canning pears, sitting around in a circle on the screened-in-back porch, the pears soaking clean in buckets and the long peelings dangling and squilly. They let me dip my hands in the cool water of the buckets and hand out the pears when one of them called out "ready for another"; but l was not allowed to use the knives, which were sharpened particularly so as not to bruise the delicate white meat and let the juices run out.

My job would come later when it was time to turn the broken pieces into marmalade, stuffing them through the grinder which attached to a perch on the kitchen cabinet, one of the many features of this wonderful piece of equipment which had introduced the concept of domestic efficiency to the modern woman.

But no, hair did not ripen like pears in a certain month and I must wait for the material for the family wreath to be gathered. Also unlike pears, hair will keep. This was to be a work of art. Each strand of hair was carefully examined, judged, selected for the wreath or rejected and set aside for pincushion filler.

I wanted my own hair to be included and brought the few strands that came out when I worked at my tangles to Aunt Ina.

"Oh, you little sweetheart, darling Annabelle, of course you want your hair to be in the family wreath, but don't you see how curly and short it is. It wouldn't knot." She kissed me and hugged me, and I tried to smile. I could hardly kick her in the shins, my one strategy when my brothers refused to let me join in their games. I would have liked to pout, but I so despised the response I would get. "You look like I could ride to China on that lip."

It was just then that Aunt Ina's beloved Irish Setter sauntered into the room and checked out the familiar scents before settling at Aunt Ina's feet. "Doll Baby," she said in the tone of a mother to a dear infant.

When Aunt Ina groomed "Doll Baby" she pulled the long hairs from the brush and dropped them into the trash. I knew that it did not go into her china hair-keeper. The dog was loved by everyone in the family because she was Aunt Ina's comfort when her sweetheart died overseas, bringing to a close their long and chaste engagement. I had seen her myself bury her face in Doll Baby's coat and shake with grief. All the women of the household were grieving for happy lives promised but not realized because of death, "the discourtesy of death" as W. B. Yeats put it in his poem "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory." I had not yet heard of Yeats, but I was in training to understand him.

The wreath was a memorial to grief though they never said that it was. Grandmother and Mother each worked in the lock of hair they had snipped when their husbands died, but they did it in secret, splicing with their own abundant strands as expertly as they spliced knitting yarn, knitting the interminable sweaters for my brothers and myself. They never said. Who could ask them? Certainly not the child I was. The boys, who would ask anything if they felt like it, never questioned an activity so totally feminized.

[Part two of a short story by Virginia McKinnon Mann. Click here for the third installment.]