Yea! I can braid my hair again! Janelle cut my hair last week, taking off a half-inch but strategizing for growing it out. It was dreadfully shaggy, not having been cut since November and that cut being--immediately I left the salon--extremely cute and hugging my chin but nothing I could style on my own. It's been a year of various lengths from chin to collar bone and now I am certain I want at least collar bone. Previously she had cut it to be loose, for "movement," and this meant that although none was higher than my chin (the minimum for braiding) some bits were shorter than other bits and so short locks would stick out of any plait. Now, despite the recent loss of that half-inch, it is beginning to be all of a length.
It's not an attractive braid by any means, and cannot be braided off my scalp but ends at the nape in an elastic and another inch or two of leftovers, but I have missed plaiting my hair. I am too old for pigtails, and I don't like the center part that two pigtails give me and never mastered the part on a bias and diagonal pigtails thing anyway; so other than the small braid within loose hair, I have been unbraided for a year now, and I have missed it, the process, the result, the motion, the sensation.
I miss Granny too, but I do not require of myself to mourn forever. She's the one who taught me to braid to begin with, and I am glad to return to a braided life.
Once again, all books are one book (not really). Those bits of Underworld I liked least were those that reminded me of American Pastoral. In The Count of Monte Cristo, someone has had two attacks of some kind and knows he will not survive a third, because no one has. In War and Peace, vulturous relatives are waiting for someone to die. His German doctor says "Dere has neffer been a gase...dat one liffs after de sird sdroke."