Wearing Away the Stone

Image credit: Photo by lfaisco on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

As I was brushing my hair recently, I noticed a few strands of gray. My mother's hair seemed to turn white nearly overnight in her late forties. She said it was the grief of losing two close family members within less than a year that stole its color and I always believed her. My father didn't even begin to go gray until he was in his seventies. So, being myself at the age where forty is flirting with thirty, it feels early (as far as my own family is concerned) to see silver starting to streak my hair. Yet I am oddly pleased. It's been three years since the tips of the strands at my shoulder peeked out from my scalp, so the gray tells the story of the last few years, just like the rings of a tree will tell when the weather was wet or when there was a fire. The story is one of trauma, with grief bleaching away what used to be, but it's also a story of change and wisdom.

When my son was an infant and I was home with him all day, staring and staring at his perfect and tiny face, I would be shocked to when my husband came home and shocked when I looked in the mirror: shocked by how huge and ugly and rough we looked. I suppose it's taken me all these eight years to get used to it, but I'm pleased these days by the tiny lines on my face too. I was looking at my daughter's forehead the other day and it struck me again how smooth it is. I don't know when the furrows on my brow became permanent -- I thought they had always been there, like the creases on my hands that a palm reader interprets -- but looking at my daughter I know that this must not have been the case. At some point those lines were created on my face, worn in by repeated use, and from the look of them, that use was a lot of furious thinking.

When I was in college, one of the administration buildings (which was many things before it was filled with offices) had a set of ancient stone steps leading to the door. Each one was worn down so much, that they looked almost like a series of bowls, and water would pool in them when it rained. Whenever I walked slowly up and down those steps (since deliberation was necessary on the uneven surfaces), I would think of all the hundreds of feet that had gone before me, each one wearing away the stone a little more. It didn't seem a sad thing to me that the stone was disappearing or that it was no longer flat; instead, it seemed beautiful to think of all that had gone into making them worn and imperfect.