When I talk about my hair, it tends to only be about the color.  Maybe the length.  Never really the texture.

As a little girl I had straight, long, almost fire orange hair.  (Let's be honest, a fire is orange or blue, never red.)  I wore a lot of braids.  Otherwise I had a lot of tangles.

In middle school I cut it shorter, grew it longer, slept in braids, tried to keep an ounce of wave in my straight as a stick hair.

In high school I started donating it.  Grow it long enough to share.  Give an inch or two for uneasy scissors.  Oh it was so awful.  I had no idea how to style it.  No idea that straighteners could be used on already straight hair to bring down some of the volume  (frizz).  It did something strange somewhere in those four years.  It got cork screw curly, for two inches, then grew out straight.

My hair wouldn't hold man-made curls, but it zigged and it zagged and it spiraled and then the actual weight of it forced it to fall flat or well, straight.

In college I alternated long shoulder length to middle of the back.  I went for all the layers.  I left long straight strands everywhere I went, little reminders.  In it's place would grow a thicker, redder, coarser, curl. 

Now at the end of my twenties I find two inch sections of curl pattern at the end of eight inches of straight hair.  In the summer and late into the fall I work in the garden and come in to find amid that sweet layer of sweat, curls shaping my face.  The start of ringlets, though fairly brief.  It's the humidity, it has to be.

But now I see them, camouflaged and outnumbered by straight hairs, a few survivors, pure coarse curl with vibrant color.  At work I pulled a hair off of my sweater, a perfect ringlet, the circumference almost an inch wide.  I have real curls?  But I have straight hair.

I've heard women talking about the ways their hair changed as they aged.  I never imagined this.  I've heard of curl patterns changing, but those women had curls to begin with.

Oh, this song is going to get stuck in my head.

Labels: perfect hair, Red hair with a curl, redheads, White Stripes