Hair, Ice, Cousin

I. Penny Cooper's Afternoon Out: Hair

Since Covid, I've mostly cut my hair myself, with pinking shears, but I decided to go see my old pal, Karla, who cuts hair professionally (but affordably) for a treat––and to catch up. We were neighbors, thirty years ago.

Yesterday I went, after work. Penny Cooper went too: "A strand of my hair has come loose."
She brought a dollar to pay. (She saves money coins in a dear little pot made by potter GZ.)

(My hair looks the much same now, but it's nice to feel tidied up.)

Karla is such a pro. She determined Penny's loose strand didn't need to be cut but simply tucked in place and smoothed with a little gel.

"What's been happening with you?" she asked. "Tell me everything."

"Well, there was a disease going round," I said, "which killed millions; and the city went up in flames after a man got killed in the street by the police; and we just had a 50-degree Christmas, so I guess the Earth is melting..."

She kinda laughed. "Me too, all that!"
And there we were, attending to hair, and very nice it was, too, to share such a once-normal thing.

II. Penny Cooper's Afternoon Out: Ice

After my haircut, I walked over to the lake and met Julia, to look at the ice.  Usually the lake's been frozen for many weeks by now and is covered in snow, but not this year.
While the warm, dry weather is alarming, the conditions allow for great ice viewing.

Julia's hands, my turmeric coat & raspberry boots:

Julia is a master of ice and takes astonishing photos of it.
Below is my screencap of her Instagram page. Take a look at more: instagram.com/happifydesign

My pictures all have some little doll in them. Imagine that.

The ice is several inches deep, with many frozen over cracks.
I felt nervous and didn't walk far from shore, though people were walking and skating on the center of the lake.

BELOW: "It's a transporter!" Penny Cooper prepares to beam up.
(That's an air bubble trapped in the ice.)

BELOW: Seaweed in ice.
(I would just note that the girlettes do not get cold. "We're plastic."
But I do--it was damp and chilly.)

III. Cousin Celia

Sister texted me in the evening: our oldest cousin, Celia, has died--the first of our cousins to go. A heart attack.
At 78, Celia was fifteen years old than I am. (Fifteen?!) 
I remember her as a cool young adult I saw at our grandmother's yearly birthday parties.

Sister saw the news from another relative on Facebook.
The last time we'd seen Celia was at our grandmother's funeral in the mid-1990s. She estranged herself afterward from family on her mother's side (which included our father). I don't know why, but that's normal in our family, which carries a Sicilian gene for unrelenting resentment.

Looking at the photo her son posted on FB, below, right, I think she must have been fashionable all her life.
Nice haircut. She looks a bit like Sofia Coppola to me.

That is not a Palestinian scarf, btw--at first I thought it was. Though Celia was a fundamentalist Xtian, so who knows what ideas she held about the the Second Coming in Israel, and all that nonsense.

Below, left: And there's baby Celia in the arms of her mother, my Auntie Mary, who sent me a birthday card every year of my life until she got Alzheimer's. She was famous for sending cards to everyone.
I took it for granted when I was young, but looking back, it was like getting haircuts in a salon: a civilizing thing.

Funny, these strangers whose lives intersect with one's own... Like fault lines in the ice, they just keep going into the distance.