editorials

Scissorhands

I heard the snip, snip, snip of my hairdresser’s scissors and watched as two-inch sections of my wet hair fell to the floor of the salon last week. I haven’t visited Marcy or the hair salon in fifteen months, and I was tickled to sit in her chair and chit chat about nothing.

Last year, just after the pandemic swept across the globe, my husband and I began hearing of friends and associates who contracted COVID. Some sailed through the illness with barely a cough. Others were hospitalized for long periods of time with complications. A few died (and died alone), as family members tried to make sense of it all.

My husband and I made the decision to protect ourselves and others by limiting our exposure to the outside world as much as possible. We picked up our groceries at the curb. We used a phone app to deposit our checks into our bank account.

“I’ll learn to cut your hair,” Gene said to me one day as we sat in front of the television watching the evening news. “I’ll watch some videos on YouTube, and I’ll learn how. I’m pretty sure I can do it.”

“I think you can, too,” I replied. “But Marcy also covers up the gray strands every couple of months. I’m not sure you and I can color my hair without damaging it.”

He nodded in understanding.

My hair and scalp are fragile things. Someone looks at me wrong and my hair falls out. Someone dies in our family, and it falls out for four or five months and leaves bald patches. I’ve dealt with hair thinning and breakage for years. For those reasons, I’ve gone to an Aveda salon for the last three years. Their color and coloring process seem to be gentler than most.

A few weeks after the initial conversation, I returned home from work to find a box of hair color on the kitchen island.

Gene rushed into the kitchen and pointed to the box. “Look! Madison Reed!” he said. “How did you even know what color to order?” I asked. “I chatted with one of their colorists, and she and I figured it out,” he answered.

I opened the box and looked at the name on the bottle — Bologna Blonde. The color didn’t sound very appealing to me.

“Bologna?” I asked.

He smiled and nodded.

I did their strand test, and it seemed to look pretty close to my real color. The following night, Gene and I huddled in the bathroom. I read the instructions to him, as he squeezed colored goo out of a plastic bottle onto my parted hair like he was squeezing mustard or ketchup onto a hotdog. We massaged the color goo into my hair with gloved hands and set the timer. A half hour later, I rinsed my hair and watched the colored streams of water disappear down the shower drain.

While my hair was still wet, we combed it straight, and with nervous hands, Gene carefully clipped off the ends.

“Don’t worry about trying to cut layers into it,” I said. “I can live without layers for a while.”

After drying my hair, I admired the cut and color in the bathroom mirror.

“Hey, it looks pretty good,” I answered. “Thank you!”

We were both relieved when my hair didn’t fall out in the days that followed. I shared photos with my friends and coworkers, and they were quite impressed. Many confided to me that they wouldn’t let their spouses touch the hair on their heads with ten-foot poles.

So during the pandemic, Gene cut and colored my hair three times, and my hair seems to be healthier than it has been in years. I reciprocated and cut Gene’s hair about ten times, and I did pretty good, too.

Still, I was happy to have Marcy apply lowlights (darker streaks) last week and snip the ends for me. It made me feel somewhat normal again.

I feel fortunate to have a husband who cares enough about me that he’s willing to step outside the box and learn how to do things he knows will make me happy. I know I can depend on him for anything anything. Thank God I found him.