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Nellie washed my hair, gently, in the salon sink this afternoon. She ran rough fingers over my temples and backwards toward the crown. She put a plump arm under my neck and lifted it up to get the hair out from under, and I imagined her thinking This head is so heavy, this girl's head so heavy, what's in this girl's head, as the water rinsed it all away.

Thank you all for your kind comments on my posts, lately. I love you madly.

Shower Caps

This is the back of Oliver's sweet neck. He got a haircut yesterday at the salon where I go. He grinned the entire time and asked Andie to put gel in his hair and make it spiky. Last night, when I insisted he take a shower, he asked whether he could put on a plastic shower cap so that the spikes would stay. I told him that we didn't have any shower caps and then he reminded me that I had bought these weird plastic covers for leftovers and that I called them shower caps. So he went to the kitchen and put on this "shower cap," all the time chattering about it and laughing and asking me to look at him and then he got into the shower and since our house is so small, I could hear the water hitting the shower cap and splattering off of it and this went on for quite some time until he got out of the shower and came into my bedroom with a towel wrapped around him and the shower cap still on his head. He took it off carefully and felt his hair even more carefully and then exclaimed Cool! It's still dry, Mom! And he was still smiling and so light and buoyant I believe he might have sailed up and out of the room or even the back door and into the night.