See? This is what happens when I a) really need a haircut and b) go to bed with wet hair.

Blame it on my mother. She had, in her own words, hair like a horse’s tail. It was thick, coarse, and if she stopped paying attention for a short period of time, it would grow long enough for her to sit on. When I was little I loved to watch her wash her hair. She would take out her many hairpins, wash and rinse her hair in the tiny bathroom sink, and sit downstairs on the radiator to brush it out and let it dry. (Lest you be confused, I will explain that the radiator was a grate in the floor, under which resided our basement-monster wood furnace.) On warm days she would sit outside in the sun.

A neighbor once recounted a story of a man who had been looking for her house, and accidentally wound up at ours. When finally he got to the neighbor’s house, he said in wonderment, “I have just seen a vision. I came up to this house, at the end of this long dirt road, and there was the most beautiful woman, with the most beautiful long red hair, sitting out on her porch in the sun, like she had always been there.”

None of us girls got the red, but we did get a tamer version of the hair. Except for Mary. Hers was wild, a bramble thicket, from the time she was born. I have a picture of her sitting on my father’s lap, and her hair blooms around her like a mad sunflower. When she got older it would grow just like our mother’s, down to her waist in nothing flat. She keeps it short these days, perhaps in self-defense.

Fast forward to my own family. My husband has a wild thicket of his own; he cuts it once a year whether he needs it or not. My boys have his propensity to grow a beard, and like him, they don’t fight it very hard. It’s always a mild shock when one of them shows up clean-shaven. In high school Jon, with iron-straight hair, favored a ponytail, while Brooks let his curls do pretty much whatever they wanted. As our hairdresser Wendy once said, “You all are a family of Chia Pets.”

I feel some wonderment at the cultural significance of hair, at the rows and rows of hair products at the supermarkets, at the various brands of snake oil purported to bring it back if it tries to escape. Above all, is the phenomenon of trying to make our hair do and be something artificial. Straight-haired people get perms, curly-haired people iron it, and everybody (well, almost everybody) tries various colors and cuts to see if the new look will finally make them into the junior-high version of “cool” that will always lurk somewhere in the lizard brain.

I had a boss once, a ninety-pound anorexic who stopped cutting her hair because she wanted to become happy with “the way God made me.” I say, let’s not go crazy. By all means, do something new with your hair, and buy some new shoes while you’re at it.