WebKittyn Warbles
Friday, November 30, 2007
Silver
(this entry is a sticky. It will remain on top all day December first. Look below for updates on my dad)
I am FishyGirl, and this month's topic for the Blog Exchange is silver and/or gold. I think we were intended to write about the holidays, but frankly silver and gold make me think of weddings more than holidays, and my husband suggested commodities markets, but I didn't think that would work, either. So here is my take on something else silver means to me.
My grandmother was a practical woman who didn't seem to give a hoot about fashion or appearances, at least, to me she didn't. When I got married in 1993, I had to take her out shopping to make sure she wouldn't wear one of the velour track suits or shapeless mumus that she taken to wearing then to the wedding, most of them either giveaways from one of the many sporting events my grandfather judged or souvenirs from the best five-and-dime store in the podunk towns they visited.
This lackadaisical attitude about her appearance extended to her hair. She had lovely deep auburn hair, not red enough to be a redhead, yet not brown, either. She never colored it, and most of the time she kept it cut short and close to her head in a pixie, which was easy for her to maintain. Around the time of my wedding, though, she had grown it out for a while, so that it fell past her shoulders, and she tended to keep it either in a braid or up in a bun. She would have been around 65 years old at that time, and she didn't have a single silver hair.
And she didn't get one for some time, either. Until she got breast cancer. She had a mastectomy and chemo but no radiation, so she didn't lose her hair, but one of the effects of the chemo was that her hair started to turn silver, a few strands at first, then more and more, but never enough to overpower the auburn. It got thin, too, and someone from the cancer center gave her a hairpiece to wear, an unattractive thing that sat like a cap overtop of her wispy silver hair. Her cancer went into remission for years, and the hair grew back in, but with more silver than ever.
When the cancer returned and she passed away in 2006, my grandmother still had fewer silver hairs than many women my own age, much less in their 70s. And when my own mother, her daughter, had passed away, she didn't have any silver hairs that I could see, and I was fifteen, so self conscious and insecure that I surely would have noticed and been appalled; instead I had to make myself miserable being embarrassed by her clothes and shoes and the manner in which she breathed and how she dared walk too close to me, so someone might think I knew her.
I am the age my mother was when she died, and slowly, those fine, soft silver hairs are creeping in. Society tells me to deny my age, to pluck and color and hide these harbingers of age. But I am going to take a page from my grandmother's book, and the silver threads that wind their way through my hair will stay for as long as I have breath, badges of experience and the depth of character that life has wrought.
FishyGirl is a 30-something mom of four kids ages 8 and under. She blogs at The Fish Pond, where you can find the lovely WebKittyn and her take on silver and gold. Check out all the posts on silver and gold at Blog Exchange.
<-- Steal me!
