Free The Lavender Hour by Anne Leclaire

alive?”
    Lily laughed. “Would you rather I buy a motorcycle?”
    “What, Mama? Those are the choices?” I took a deep breath. “I'm just worried about you. I mean, think about it. You're sixty-five years old.”
    “I'm perfectly aware of my age, thank you.”
    “And you're talking about sailing across the ocean. Can't you see how dangerous that is?”
    “The truth of it is, I'd rather die sailing to Europe than at home in bed.”
    Or hunched over a steering wheel, stopped short in the prime of life by something a lot bigger than a red light. I pushed the thought away, got back to Lily's transformation, which I couldn't explain. “This doesn't even sound like you,” I said.
    “Life doesn't stay the same, honey. People change.”
    “I do. I stay the same.”This, I suddenly realized, was true. In spite of all I'd been through, in spite of wanting a new beginning, Iwas essentially the same person I'd been before the tumor, before my move to the Cape.
    “Maybe you shouldn't.”
    “What?”
    “Stay the same.”
    I ignored this. “So, what are you saying? You're having some kind of late-onset change-of-life crisis?”
    Another pause, this one longer. “Jessie, honey,” Lily said, her voice calm, “two things: I love you. And I'm not having this conversation.” And then, to my amazement, my mama hung up.
    A HALF hour later, I was still sitting there staring at the pad and the doodle of the nest and eggs, immobilized by my conversation with Lily. The sound of the UPS truck roused me.
    “Hey, Kenny,” I said, as the driver approached with a package. During the last six months, he had made so many deliveries for the jewelry business that we had developed a first-name friendship. He was married with two kids and a wife who worked days at a retirement home in Hyannis.
    “About time we had some sun,” he said.
    “Sure is,” I said, as I signed for the padded envelope. The return address was marked Sonoma, California. I recognized the customer's name from earlier correspondence. Another cancer patient.
    I carried the envelope up to my studio. The morning's work— the piece for the young leukemia patient—was still on the table. I had nearly completed weaving the braid and could soon begin fashioning the bracelet.
    I opened the envelope. Like most of my customers, this one had sent the hair sealed in a plastic bag, bound by elastic. When I withdrew the duplicate order form, I checked for a note and was surprised to find none. People often included personal anecdotes or histories along with the hair, and although many were from women who had cancer, there were other stories, too, like that from themother whose son had just joined the navy. She sent a strand she had kept ever since his first haircut. Now she wanted it preserved in a locket. (Imagine, I thought when I received the order, keeping those flaxen strands so carefully for all those years. I had held the hair and wondered if I would ever know the terrifying joy of having a child.) A coed at Mississippi State sent her hair braided into a plait as thick as the arm of a child. She wrote that, all through her childhood, her mother had braided her hair every morning, pulling it with a vengeance, so tight that she wept. Now she was setting herself free. A woman from Fond du Lac told me that her hair held all her power. She wanted me to create a “power piece” for her that she could pin on her clothes. A widow from Sante Fe told me the An-deans believed that, after death, hair was braided into a bridge that helped the soul of the dead cross a dangerous ravine to reunite to the body. She had sent strands of her husband's hair, the yellowish off-white of blond gone gray. A natural blond from Washington asked me if I knew that Princess Diana had spent more than six thousand dollars a year having her hair bleached. I hadn't known that but didn't doubt it for a minute.
    But, as I said, the envelope Kenny delivered contained only the order form and the customer's