Quarantine Hair: I’ve Got Curls All Over My Head. How Did That Happen? Sheltering at Home Week 22

August 15, 2020. Sheltering at Home Week 22

I looked in the mirror this morning to be startled, once again, by a massive ball of fluff floating around my head. White fluff.

Bleary from sleep, I wondered, what was that white stuff, anyway?

Ohmygosh, I realized, that’s my hair. My quarantine hair. And it’s growing. It’s been growing like this for months now, getting bigger and bigger by the day.

The Body’s Impulses

That’s not me in the mirror, I think when I first see myself in the morning. The woman I see looks dangerously out of control. Messy. Unpredictable. A mad, blousy woman who can’t control the impulses of her body.

But then as I blink myself awake, I remind myself that I haven’t had a haircut since February. In six months of coronavirus shut-down, my hair has grown from a tidy, professional two inches to a wild and wooly five. That fluff ball on my head is my very own hair.

I also notice that the fluff in the mirror has started to curl into tendrils lately. Tight ones, like shoots on a pea vine. My hair has arranged itself into glorious, Shirley Temple ringlets. It’s adorable. I’m adorable. What the heck! I didn’t know I was adorable.

I’ve Got Curls — Like Shirley’s

In second grade, it was Shirley Wagnitz who was adorable. She had long, shiny, brown hair that trickled down her back in ringlets. Everybody in our class loved Shirley Wagnitz. She was kind and sweet, but I figured she was loved for her curls. I wanted her curls.

Early in the shut-down, as my hair started to grow longer and longer, I assumed that eventually it would flatten into droopy disarray.

Didn’t happen. Instead it has sprouted tight, springy curls. Shirley Temple curls. Shirley Wagnitz curls.

How can that be? I had no idea that my hair had curl potential. The last time I wore my hair down below my ears, back when Jon and I were first married, it was wavy. A nice head of hair. But wavy, never curly.

Fifteen Years of Fame

I confess, I can’t take my eyes off these brand-new curls of mine. Where in the world did they come from?

Was this predestined by my DNA? Had these curls been lurking in my body all these years, since well before second grade, waiting for their last-minute, fifteen years of fame?

I study this hair. It fascinates me. I feel I am watching nature at work here, doing what nature does. Which is equal parts miraculous and inevitable.

It’s like a flock of geese making its inevitable way south in the fall. Or a squirrel squirreling away nuts for a winter it doesn’t know is coming. Or a yellow jacket catching the smell of dinner out on the deck and making a nose dive for my hamburger.

My hair can’t help itself right now, it seems. It’s gotta curl.

A Cranky, Late-Model Homo Sapiens

Nature is at work. God is at work. God is alive and well and messing with the hairs on my head. Apparently, God has not finished creating me. There is still more to do: “Let’s try putting curls on the head of this cranky, late-model homo sapiens. Let’s see what she does with them.”

So, what do I do with this mass of curls and fluff?

Keep it for sure. See what it does next. See if, along with the Shirley Wagnitz ringlets, kindness and sweetness emerge from the primordial soup.

Fluffy hair. Fluffy wardrobe choices. Fluffy co-workers and bosses. More fluff tomorrow in “Is Fluffy the New Black?”  You might also like “Nature. We Love It. But Does It Give a Darn About Us?”