Perhaps I should have just gone to beauty school and gotten a license to cut hair. If timed right, I do a pretty decent job. And by that I mean the family members whose hair I cut are satisfied.
My daughter said, "you still could, then at least you would be getting paid to listen to strangers' lives." I asked her how short she wanted it, then made the first chop. Her auburn hair starting falling to the grass as I imagined myself to be Edward Scissorhands, only slower and not as pale.
Then we chatted about things as mothers and grown daughters do, noticing for the first time she was getting a sprinkling of white hair. We talked about my father, dead for nine years now, how he always went to the barber shop on a weekly basis. The men on his side of the family went white young, though you could barely tell with him, his hair kept under one-half inch at all times.
I remembered one of the last times I saw him before he died. He asked me to shave his face, which at the time, in the hospital, seemed far too intimate but I did it anyway. He was briefly happy and then he died a few days later. Pulled back from my reverie, my daughter shook her head side to side and I brushed off her shoulders a few trimmings, watched as the wind blew some of her hair away. She went inside to shower and shampoo.
I got a beer and sat in a chair, in the late afternoon sun, wondering how many bird nests would be made from her lovely hair.