LONG hair to long hair

by Carolyn Osborne
(Columbus, OH)

I did not cut my hair for thirty-one years. At the age of 16, my hair was to my shoulders and across the years it steadily grew and grew and grew. It got to the point where I couldn't let it go loose because of how snarled it got, but when I unbraided it to comb it out, it was down to my knees. It took a long time to braid it!

My hair was the source of a lot of comments and people liked it a lot. Many people told me never to cut it. My niece even liked to play with the tail end of it, below the hair elastic. It had started to go gray when I was eighteen, and by middle age, it was very striking looking. Of course, the bottom part, which was thirty-one years old, was a different color than the part close to my head--it was like having a time line attached to me.

By middle age, though, I was having constant neck aches. I kept my hair in a single braid and I thought that was the problem, so I started braiding it into two braids. But 46 year old women should not have two braids like Laura Ingalls Wilder and if I had piled them on top of my head I probably would have gotten a headache to go with my neck ache.

It was time to do something about it. I asked a friend whose hair I liked for a reference to her beautician. I had never been in a salon at all, so this was going to be a totally new experience for me. I decided that if I was going to cut my hair, I needed to go to a real expert.

On the appointed day, I went, and they cut off a good 18" to donate to Locks of Love. Then the hair stylist washed it and began to shape it.

I got the surprise of my life at that moment. My hair was curly! I never knew that. In fact it was kind of shocking--I had never pictured myself with curly hair.

My hair is still long-ish. It's to my shoulders. If it were straight, it would be a little below my shoulders. It doesn't take eight hours to dry and my neck ache has gone away.

A lot of people with curly hair want straight hair and vice versa. So I was a person with straight hair and then totally delighted when it turned out to be curly!