high forehead | reverse threading

littlebabyscion wore the lighted tree like a sparkling bejeweled crown. the tree was the guide back to our little xb in a very crowded parking lot. littlebabyscion wore it proudly.

i’m not much of a hat-wearer. i have those 180-earmuffs and wear those mostly. i think that my face looks like a smushed pear if i wear a hat and – the other day when i tried to describe to david what my hair does when i pull on a hat – i could only verbalize it with sounds – like mwuhhh! – the sound that might demonstrate the smushing down of long hair around my long face pulled over my long forehead. goodness! so.much.long. not enough round.

i gaze around at how very delightful other gals look in hats. i mean, some women wear hats like there’s no tomorrow. stunning, adorable, beguiling, you-name-it…they can really carry off a hat. me? i have a nordic face and my thank-you-poppo-dad’s forehead and the non-thick blonde hair of someone in my ancestry. not to mention these jowls that appeared a year or so ago. don’t worry…i won’t go on and on about those again. i am vowing to go on and on less. to me. to others. to the universe. my jowls are teaching me a lesson. “be less jowlish,” they say. i will leave it to you to decide what that means. for i do not want to go on and on.

so, suffice it to say, a crown would not be my best accessory. an adornment such as that sort of requires thick hair that doesn’t really tousle easily. i fail on both accounts. i do not wake like women waking in movies. (nor do they, i suspect.) instead, i wake and look like i have pretty much slept on my head or have sleep-wandered outside and found myself in a windstorm before moseying back under the covers. clearly i am a peaceful sleeper.

i do love the idea of a hat, though. and back in the day – during the forehead-bangs of the 1990s – i wore many a fine hat. a flat-brimmed black felt hat, a kelly green felt upturned-brim bucket hat, a paddy cap, a cowboy hat…once on, they were my companions for the whole entire day as hat-hair is a thing to which one does not want to expose others. it was my millinery period of time and i still have the hats in hatboxes in my studio closet. one never knows when hat-juju might strike.

and so, the two winter hats i have call my name every now and then.

we got out of littlebabyscion to go hike the trail. it was cold and really damp, a deep chill. i pulled the hat-with-the-biggest-pompom-you’ve-ever-seen over my head and reveled in the instant warmth. there is definitely something to be said about this whole-head-hat-thing as opposed to the 180s.

i pulled on my miracle mittens, looked at my reflection in the car window and began to walk away from the parking lot.

but not before i could hear littlebabyscion stifling a guffaw, trying hard not to laugh.

*****

read DAVID’S thoughts this NOT-SO-FLAWED WEDNESDAY

for us, it’s easy to like chicken…our chicken marsala, that is. we made him up; he is the (mutual) son we didn’t have together. and so, he’s a jeans-wearing-black-shirts-mostly-flip-flop little boy. he takes after david with his esoteric wisdom and me with his high forehead and sentimentality. he has much more brevity than either of us, but he’s little, so give him time.

it’s easy for us to be invested in chicken’s antics, to laugh aloud at his shenanigans, to get a little misty at his emotional ties. but we have driven across the country with david making up his little voice in the backseat; we have taken a three foot tall flat-chicken into welcome centers and family gatherings; we have taken pictures of our chicken at the colorado border and hanging out in the back of the xb.

and so, it’s easy for us to believe that chicken marsala would have an instant following – an ever-growing group of people who believe in him kind of like how they believed in charlie brown or calvin (well, maybe a teeny little bit like charlie brown or calvin.) because we do. we believe in him. his snippets of wisdom, his goodness, his take on life. i realize that, like any story, it’s possible that maybe it is hard to start in the middle. (i am the worst at starting in the middle of any movie – i ask a million questions trying to catch up…)

so i just want to say this: if you had a chance to have a little boy in your life, one whose wise words entered your heart and whose voice countered the narrative so prevalent in our world now, and, even if he was, ok, make-believe, wouldn’t you just love it to be a little boy like our Chicken? this nugget is for you. play. with abandon. like a little make-believe boy. like there’s no tomorrow.