#6 In-Class Example Essay - Hair

#6 In-Class Example Essay

Hair

Hair: animal hair, people hair, fake fur, feathers.  It all is similar, yet it all is different.  Hair has many purposes.  Most hair covers bodies for a very practical purpose: protection from the elements.  It can keep one warm in winter, and protect from excessive rays of sun in summer.  Bird feathers have an additional purpose, that of being used to attract a prospective mate.  Whatever its use, whatever its type, hair is an ever-present part of our everyday lives.  In our family, three types of hair are especially apparent - indoor pet hair, outdoor horse hair, and, of course, people hair.

Being a family that loves animals, we have an overabundance of hairy critters occupying our home.  I love to have a cat sitting on my lap or on my belly as I lay in bed, purring away while I run my fingers through the soft fur.  And although the dogs don’t get bathed as often as they should, they keep reasonably clean by rolling in the snow, grass, or leaves, and I don’t mind washing the layer of dirt off that is left behind after a good scrub.  Our oldest cat, Shadow, is now 18, and his fur, like the rest of his body, has shown signs of wear and tear.  The thick, shiny, silver-lined gray hair has become dull and limp; the skin underneath flaky in spots, covering a sparse frame.  But we don’t tell him he’s changed; we don’t want to hurt his feelings.  So he still thinks he’s as beautiful as always, and beneath it all, he definitely is.  With 3 cats and 2 dogs, all with long fur, except one, our house is full of pet hair.  But I don’t mind.  Some seasons are worse than others; that’s when it seems you can clean corners every five minutes and it looks the same.  But thankfully, we live where we can at least let the dogs out for most of the day during shedding season, which is a help.  It’s funny, but our only short-hair animal, a cat named Smudge, is the worst culprit of all.  His shedding season seems to last from March until January.  (Yes, that means we have a total of one month when we can pet him without cat hair sticking to our hands, filling the air and our noses with cat fur.)  We must REALLY love animals to put up with that… and we do.

Outdoors, our horse population has shrunk from three to one, making it more manageable, but less fun.  Horses definitely do have a shedding season.  It starts early, before it actually warms up, and for some reason, seems to start on the face and move back and down from there.  Our present horse doesn’t have much white on his face, but our old horse, Danny Boy, had a very wide white blaze, a striking contrast to his chestnut body.  That blaze was very unusual.  The hair there would be several times as dense as anywhere else on his body.  You could actually feel the difference as you pet him.  And when springtime came, that blaze was the first place to shed out.  Petting his face, which he loved, sent horse hair flying everywhere.  A person had to be careful that it didn’t completely cover Danny’s eyes or lodge in his nose, not to mention what it did to the human involved.  And when the rest of a Danny Boy’s shedding body caught up to his face, the ground was so covered with  horse hair, it looked like he’d been ruptured, leaving his earthly garb behind.  It’s surprising, but horsehair has actually been quite useful through the years.  It’s been used for filling mattresses and as a binder in plaster in old houses.  In fact, a house I am renovating has horse-hair plaster, which is quite strong.  While tearing down an old wall, you could easily tell the difference between the part that had the horse hair and the part that was added later, which didn’t.  In fact, the wall needed replacing simply because the non-horsehair part didn’t hold up!  So horsehair might be a nuisance, but if times get desperate, we might have to start putting it to good use again.

Pet hair, horse hair, people hair.  What about that people hair?  When I bought that old house I’m renovating, I was told the plumbing had problems, which was quite true.  The previous owners were a large family with 3 teenage girls, and two younger girls, all with long, straight hair.  A big bottle of Draino made especially for hair helped with some of the clogged drains.  Others required more drastic measures.  When removing an old claw-foot tub during renovation, we discovered a wad of hair, much like a horse’s tail coming out of the initial drain pipe and going down the main tube.  It was long!  Now I wonder what the other drains would look like if I took them all apart…  In my own family, we aren’t blessed with long, thick hair for the most part, so I don’t have the same problems.  My only thick-haired daughter is now married and gone, taking with her the hair she used to leave behind as a token to remember her by.  But when I go to her house, I usually help clean the bathroom, with an abundance of black, curly hair, because unfortunately, she’s afraid of spiders and those clusters of hairs look too much like arachnids for her to deal with. 

And so, hair is a part of life, whether it’s in your own home, outside in the barn, in homes you visit, or on your own head.  Some people are possessed by their hair, continually occupied with keeping up the façade it helps create.  They are much like the birds who fluff and preen their feathers, trying to look their best to make the best catch.  Some prefer long hair, some short; some with thick hair have it thinned, some with thin hair use products to make it thick.  Some with curly hair use straighteners, while others with straight hair use curling irons to change their looks.  Some dark-haired beauties lighten their hair, while other blondes change their hair color completely.  I often wonder why more people don’t like their own hair, especially when others would give almost anything for the same look.  But, for better or worse, hair makes a statement.  It says something about the person sporting that mop atop their head.  And that, I think, is the answer to my own wonderings.  And now, I wonder, what does my own hair say about me?