Outside our bedroom window, the bare crowns of white oaks rock in the wind. Their glossy deeply lined leaves, burnt sienna blended into ambers and fire yellows, had fallen into crunchy piles months ago. Bald, these patient oaks withstand Chicago’s stinging sleet, crystalline ice storms, soot, and diesel particles. I recognize in myself an impulse towards beauty and I am like these naked trees. The trouble is, my hair is falling out. Long wavy black and silver strands lay on our floor, ugly tangles attracting epic dust bunnies. My bare feet pick through a mine-field of the shining, the dull, and the fallen as I tip-toe toward the bathroom.

My spouse, Alan, is down in the basement at his desk, among our dusty bookshelves, near the laundry room that holds eager black and blue luggage and Steampunk cosplay and my parents’ old sweaters which I stole from their closet as keepsakes. We have the privilege of working remotely, though my work has slowed since COVID devastated me with chronic illnesses. I’m upstairs in our bedroom, exhausted by the sight of my own detritus. I try desperately to clean-up before Alan comes upstairs for a break. I want to hide how much hair I’m losing, how much has fallen apart, the physical evidence of my invisible illness. He works so hard, he loves so hard, and I want him to be happy or at least spare him from sadness.

My toes slide in small, quick circles across the smooth floor. They’ve grown prehensile as they do the job of sweeping my hair. The strands, though thin, are strong and unruly and they are tenacious. Months earlier, I’d tried our vacuum. It has a long red extension and so we gave it the jaunty name Ruby Rod after a character in the movie Fifth Element. Through the clear, plastic collection chamber, my fallen hair could be seen wrapping around the core suction part and had threatened to ignite. So, this morning I do the toe-sweep.

When we first got married Alan had teased, “Your hair sneaks into everything!” To a Beatles tune, we sang, “Hair, making its way everywhere.” Sometimes, the lyric changed to, “Making its way…underware?”

Later, when our son was in high school, he’d find my hair tangled in his laundry and among his harp compositions. Alan found wet strands clinging to the drain, rooted in his beard, and knotted in the pockets of his jeans. Black nests of it stuck to the crotch of my fresh, clean sweats. My sneaky, snaky hair meandered into moist, living cracks and crevices. We shall not go into detail.

I remember the years before COVID, when I walked down the sun-filled sidewalks of town, passed mom and pop joints, unassuming cafés, and working art studios. My hair used to weigh on me, like a friend riding piggy-back. I never felt alone. At bedtimes, my hair fell like gentle rain, regular and steady, probably from the heft of it. But now, post-COVID, it falls in gales and blusters. This winter season, I exist in lingering uncertainty. Is this the beginning of the end? Am I catching that moment, the downward slide of my body, my natural disintegration? These questions churn my belly. Alone and my thoughts swirling, I try not to dwell on what I probably can’t change or control. But this biting gray morning, like any small human being who is feeling the edges of her fragility in the universe, I want to know why. Why is this happening to me?

As I squat to pick up the swirls of hair, I can’t help but wonder if what doctors say is true: People can lose hair because of anxiety. Does societal anxiety count? Is my hair falling out from the accumulated toxins of White supremacy? My hair fell when an historic presidential election catalyzed racial hatred and enflamed the nation. In the days and months after the election, BIPOC people in my town were openly spit on, jeered at, cussed out, and stalked by shopping cart. In the forest, I seek solace, solitude, and refuge, and to commune with the senescence of the Trees. Their longevity shows me it’s possible to endure people’s encroachment and violence. I keep half an eye out for White men, men in general, who track my movements and have mean determination in their eyes

Is my hair falling from a lifetime of being belittled and made small by men, those who tell me that my achievements are nothing, those who overlook and interrupt and talk over me and pivot the conversation when I speak about my life? My body desperately wants to forgive the slings and hurts that keep my spirit bleeding.

But what if the reverse is true? Can my hair jump up from the floor and reattach to my follicles from the love of the respectful, kind men in my life? From the courage of my White friends who challenge their families and friends and examine their own complicity? Can I restore my hair through self-love and nourishment? Will the big booming laughter and piercing intelligence of my sisters, cousins, and sister-friends massage care into my scalp? Will their viscous love sink into my pores and penetrate my brain, transform my chemistry, and change my consciousness enough that my hair grows back, a shining cascade, a moonlit waterfall?

The sight of random chaos on the floor snaps me back to this morning and the task at hand. Music clicks on and my toes swirl black and silver strands into some semblance of order. Bouncing baselines and synthesizers, the tsssking of a brass top-hat, and a man’s phlegmy alto fill our bedroom. Lord Nelson, self-proclaimed bald-head Rasta, could no longer grow dreadlocks which are a symbol of Afro-centric resistance to European colonialism in the Caribbean. He sings that his dreads grow on the inside. He carries his resistance with him, even if his dreadlocks don’t show. Lord Nelson’s soca beats make my feet kick up the dust on my floors.

By now, my toes have swept a dozen or so tangles of hair into jumbled circles. Combined, the springy black mass is the size of a tennis ball and piled into my cupped hands. What if all my hair falls out this year? Like Lord Nelson, will my spirit-hair, my hair which resists the forces of hatred and greed in the world, start to grow inward?

As I squish the hairball between my palms, I step passed our bathroom medicine cabinet and avoid looking in the mirror. Inside, plastic amber bottles stay hidden. Medical explanations drift like January’s snowflakes into my mind. My incisive immunologist said, “COVID also makes people’s hair fall out.” People in my online Oral Allergy Syndrome (OAS) group talk about how their hair falls out in clumps due to our severe food allergies. My Xolair injections keep me breathing and enable me to live as an, albeit limited, outdoorswoman. But the prescription warns that this medicine might make my hair fall out, too.

The time comes to finish the task, for me to say goodbye to this harvest of the fallen. The lid to our small metal trashcan opens and I brace myself. The bathroom trash is full and the top two-inch layer is my hair. Words like “ugly” or “aging” blast like memes. I try not to judge myself for the ravages of social inequity, viruses, and life on what was once my crowning glory.

When I toss the new hairball in, the lid won’t shut. The hair-ball props the can open and long black tangles spill over like stray bangs or a wild monster-tongue. In the slant of morning light, it looks like the trashcan has come alive. Like a Muppet, it could grow eyes and start speaking in a grouchy, friendly voice. A delicious giggle shakes my whole body. I can get so serious about my hair and about the world’s entanglements. Outside, the Trees’ bare crowns shiver with the wind.

Inside, I dare to look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, at a woman in black and white striped pajamas. It’s hard to tell her age but probably somewhere in the middle years. The woman is naked of make-up, her hair pulled back in a loose pony tail that’s hanging down her back the way it did when she was six. She’s never been able to control her hair, it was always escaping flower-shaped clips and tweaking in formal pictures. Her hair liked to play tricks on her vanity. But her liquid eyes are warm and hers is a variety of a Filipina face. She sees her grandmothers, her Lola Racing’s kindness behind her eyes and Lola Mading’s love for community in her bold curves. And I notice, despite being frayed, the woman is still standing, a forest unto herself.

Assessing myself with tenderness, one truth arrives. I don’t know if I’ll ever regain my hair. But maybe I’m learning to surrender to the larger moment. I can picture a single strand of my hair falling, wiggling in slow motion, and pray over it and say thank you for the beauty and warmth it provided during our time together. To stand in a moment like this is to embrace the parts my mind has labeled as “ugly” and, if patient, to notice what has endured. If I stand, quiet and vulnerable as my friends the Oak Trees, I start to recognize a glimmer, a golden molten glow, that wasn’t inside before. Despite, or maybe because of, my suffering and loss, a new sense of confidence is growing. There’s a living inner strength that doesn’t need to shout about my own beauty. To bear witness this way is an exquisite act of self-compassion. My Tree Friends have been good teachers.

Mary Grace lives and writes at the intersection of nature, culture, and spirituality. She has written professionally for television and children’s education in such venues as CBS, Pearson Education Asia, and Schlessinger and for conservation magazines such as Sierra and Chicago Wilderness. Her award-winning fiction has appeared in Growing Up Filipino II, Our Own Voice, and The Oak Parker and her essays have appeared in various anthologies. She is a co-owner of Calypso Moon Studio, a working arts studio, in the Oak Park Arts District. Mary Grace is a member of the international N.V.M. and Narita Gonzalez Writers Group, the Historical Novel Society, New Moon Mondays, and the Acorn novelist workshop. She has served on the board of the Oak Park Arts District and was a local network rep for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. In 2017, she founded Banyan, an Asian American Writers Collective whose mission is to promote the visibility of Asian American Writers in Chicagoland and to uplift community spirit through the arts. She is a recent alumna of the low residency Mountainview MFA, where she was an Orion scholar.

Assignment:

Write about something in life that you/your character learned from more-than-humans, the Animal and Plant kin who share the Earth with us.

Extra credit: Self-compassion—Thank your body for being of benefit to you and the universe.