Outta Sight...Outta Mind

I'm of an age where having gray hair is a sad fact of life. I can no longer use the excuse that we get prematurely gray in my family. We do. I just can't use it as an excuse any more. My hair started turning dull, lifeless and gray when I was 18. Not fun at all.

So waaaaay back in my early 20s I began the odyssey of coloring the hair on my head my natural hair color. I have no idea what my hair stylist calls it, but I call it Hershey's chocolate. My natural hair color is sort of black, sort of brown with reddish tones in it. My Dad is American Indian and Scottish. Yeah, like something right out of a romance novel ain't it? Dear Mom was 100% Italian. To which I attribute my hair everywhere I DON'T want it to be, but that's a post for another day.

Anyway I started the hair color adventure by coloring my hair myself. As I became more solvent I began to have it done at the beauty shop every 6 weeks. I've now graduated to having it colored every 4 weeks. My hair is almost completely white. And before you suggest I let it go natural just let me say I've also begun the progression of having less and less hair each year. Call me crazy. Go ahead I'll wait... but thin, white, STRAIGHT hair on a pink scalp? Yeah, I don't think so.

After doing the dye job every 4 weeks for a few years now I've long since gotten over even thinking about the process. It's just a part of the ritual I go through to look, as my Mom would say, half way decent. I'm good with it. It's a fact of life.

Then it happened. Last year as I was doing a trim south of the equator when I saw it. The lone weed among the flowers. A white hair. Yes people a WHITE hair. My hand to God I never gave it a thought. But there it was reminding me...time marches on and I'm just one more soldier. I'm going to *gulp* get old, wrinkly and have white hair south of the border. It was tough, much more difficult than the gray on my rooftop, but over the past several months I've come to accept the inevitability. I mean out of sight...out of mind, right? So no problem. Out of sight and I'm good to go.

But now, now I have found white hair in my eyebrows. Do you know what white hair in your eyebrows mean? It means the white just sort of disappears against your skin and you look like you've got something nibbling away at your eyebrows creating BALD spots. What's worse is that the "hole" appears at the fullest part of the brow.

Are there worse things in life? Of course. Like smoky ashy air for one. (You didn't think I was going to miss a chance to wimper some more did you?) But enough is enough with the white hair already.

Can you survive without knowing whether Rosie will overcome brow baldness and fill in? Stay tuned for more of the "HAIR TURNS" or "Where WAS I when all this happened?"