Monday Memories – Tangled

Chewbacca and Ande

Joe sent this picture with the caption "Sunday nap" to the family yesterday.  Abe responded:  “Where does her hair end and the dog begin?”

Ande called and we laughed about the picture and the comment. She has taken a lot of ribbing on her hair through the years; I think because she has had so much more than the rest of us (at least ‘til Grace joined the family).  Ande is good natured about the teasing (now there’s an unintended pun for you).  The first time Ray saw her fresh out of bed he cried, “Medusa!” and froze in a curled position.  A few years later Ande dressed as Medusa for Halloween with Joe as the gray, stone man.

Ty used to call her the-hair-with-the-girl-attached, and Calvin, a bit envious he was losing his hair at the rate she was gaining hers, begged her to wear it natural – meaning lots of fluff and frizz. He still begs her and she still gives him an emphatic, “No.”

But one of my favorite stories of Ande has nothing to do with hair. It has to do with salt, but I guess if you put Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt, and Medusa’s victims in the same story you could draw a corollary there.

Ande loved play-dough. She had been begging to make some for several days, but each time I successfully distracted her. One morning in yet another attempt to avoid making play-dough, I said we’d make some right after her chores, knowing full-well we were low on salt, probably too low, which would mean yet one more day I didn’t have to make play-dough. But, I wouldn’t tell her no, the absence of salt would tell her. Ande hurried and did her morning chores and then I sent her to the storage room in the basement to look for salt. She was gone a very, very long time. She slowly came back upstairs and into the kitchen and sadly said, “No salt. I guess we can’t make it.”

While she was searching in the basement, I had a change of heart. I felt guilty I’d kept putting her off. I felt badly I’d sent her on a goose-chase to find the no-salt that was not in the basement. I thought if we emptied all the salt shakers in the house we could come up with enough salt for one batch of play-dough. I decided when she finally came up from the basement I’d tell her so.

After Ande came back into the kitchen so disappointed and said we wouldn’t be able to make play-dough because she couldn’t find salt, I explained emptying the salt shakers. She sat up on the counter and quickly got to work. Pretty soon she said, “When I was downstairs looking for the salt I said a prayer that I could find some.” She paused, “I looked and looked and looked, but there wasn’t any so I told Him it was okay, I knew He was too busy answering other peoples prayers today.”

I very undeservingly received a hug from her and said, “But He did answer your prayers! He reminded me of the salt shakers so that you could empty them and we’d have enough.”

Cliché as this is, the-hair-with-the-girl attached is beautiful inside and out, awake and asleep. And I’ve got lots of good memories of her, including the times I made up stories of Mr. Rat and Mr. Snarl (and their Mrs.' and the things they did and the things they ate at the party they had during her hair in the middle of the night) so that she would stand still as I brushed out her tangles every morning.