Hello, Old Friend

Colorado is pretty dry. Have I mentioned this? Dry enough to make the skin on my knuckles crack and bleed. At the grocery store tonight, the check-out clerk asked if I wanted a bag? cash back? lotion for my hands? It is also dry enough that my hair has never been so tame: without even using conditioner, it lies down, plays dead. I still get curl, but without the frizz. It has been a dreamy development for someone who spent an era struggling to tame or embrace the frizz, a definite perk to the climate.

Today, however, I noticed something. My hair had a certain fullness. A fly-away quality that I daresay felt bohemian, sexy. At first I thought it was merely that I had washed it, that I had borrowed a drop of the girls' Johnson and Johnson leave-in conditioner, that my products, curl an styling creams ordered from arrojo studio, had arrived by mail (I know this is not the greenest way to style my locks, but it is the only thing in all these years that I have found to really work.) Driving home from the office, I realized that it was nothing I had done, but something in the air.

Humidity! Oh, reviled barometric reading! Oh most loathed of forecast conditions! Oh misunderstood, under-appreciated, humidity!

I swear, today is the first vaguely humid day we have encountered in 9 months. I used to complain about it: the sweating, the way skin stuck to itself and other things, the frizz. But there was a mildness in the air tonight that felt like spring, like spring in a climate other than near-desert. When I got home, I went straight to the mirror to take a look, and sure enough, my mop was back.

Hello, old friend.