grandmaaaaaa!!!!

I visited the other Amish country this past weekend to celebrate my grandma's 80th birthday. I was a little amused and maybe somewhat nervous about the trip because I knew it would be grandma's first time seeing my dreds. And I knew she wouldn't like them.

My grandma's a good person. She's not a scrooge of an 80 year-old: certainly not. But she's Mennonite to the core. She's as spiritually wise as Ghandi and as admiring of tradition as Reb Tevye. The mix is actually a fairly splendid one. She's one of my heroes, really. She'd win you're heart, I know it.

My mother had forewarned grandma about my dreds, bless her heart, but I don't think grandma knew what to expect. When I arrived at my uncle's house, he admitted that grandma had warned him "not to react too strongly to Carrie's Guatemalan hair-style." (None of us can figure out where she got the idea that dreds were Guatemalan.) My uncle happens to co-run a coffee shop with all sorts of bohemian-style patrons and he is most definitely not the kind of person who would need a forewarning about seeing his niece in dreds. To be honest, he barely noticed.

Grandma asked me questions about the dreds.
"How did you do that?"
"Well Grandma, the process is actually pretty unglamorous. First you...etc etc"
"How do they come out?"
(This is where someone usually chimes in with the popular suggestion that I'll need to shave my head.)
"Well ya I could cut them all out, grow them all out and gradually cut them away, or get a special kind of conditioner that will help me to comb them out."
"So what will you do next with your hair in a couple months?"
"Oh well I'd like to keep them at least a year and even longer if they'll cooperate..."

This brought a momentary pause to the questions. I don't think she liked that.
Someone else sort of took over the questions and work came up. I explained how I had to wear the dreds up in a pony-tail or braid for work and no sooner had I said this than grandma re-joined by simply saying,
"Wear it in a pony-tail for church tomorrow."

On the one had, I'm a 24 year old adult who had just been told by her grandma how she must do her hair for church.
On the other hand...I'm a 24 year old adult who has dedicated an entire blog to the amusement that comes from getting a reaction out of this hairstyle. I have to admit...I enjoy disapproval as much as I dislike it...

The next day, I did indeed wear my hear up in a braid and grandma turned to me and with sweet honesty she looked at me and said, "Carrie, that looks very nice!"

We were both pleased. :)


I love my grandma.

fall fest

My friend knit me a rasta hat for my dreds and it really has made something click in me. It makes me feel like a character from a book. I pop into coffee shops and stroll down sidewalks feeling as though I'll be remembered as some carefully designed character: just slightly more than a stranger.

This past weekend I felt myself getting restless in this tiny county of mine. My twin sister is a days drive away and I am rendered "individual". Some call it lonely.
What do you do with restlessness? What do you do with loneliness for that matter?

I stuck a sketch-book, my little acer laptop and a borrowed book about road-tripping into my little red backpack and headed out the door for a different place. Somewhere out of Holmes County where I could simply be the girl with the yellow hat and dreds.

Don't let me get away with this independent picture of just painted of myself. The truth is I had my mother pick me up at Java Jo's in downtown Berlin and drop me off at the coffee-shop in Canton. Yes. I hitched a ride with my mother.

The feeling of anonymity I get from going to some other town's coffee shop is a refreshing one. I'm just some girl.

When my mother dropped me off in Berlin, the Harvest Festival parade had just begun. The road was lined with conservative Mennonite families and occasional clusters of tourists. If you grow up in this community, you have no trouble spotting what variety of "conservative" or what variety of "Mennonite" a family may be. Shirts are tucked into straight-leg jeans and denim skirts hang just above flashy white sketchers. The place is full of children who have churches to attend on Sunday and good schools to spend their weekdays in. One day these children may become mothers with the ability to make delicious home-cooked meals or fathers with 9-5 jobs and chairs at the head of the dinner table.

or perhaps one or two of them will become single 20-something bloggers with sketch-books in their backpacks instead of cheerios in their purses or sales reports in their briefcases.

It felt good walking down the road on the heels of the floats just watching people...and being watched.

Am I really that cliche? Am I really just out to be "unique?"

Perhaps this little character I've created for myself is the beginning of a better understanding of something less cliche: something more than getting a reaction.