#SOCS – Hairy

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When I was in primary school, a series of unfortunate events for my family resulted in us having to move into a rented house for a period. My mother is one of the fussiest people imaginable when it comes to cleanliness, I am quite sure she suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder [and she still does].

On the day we moved into the rented house, she made us four girls and my father literally clean the building from top to bottom before we could unpack a single thing. My family are all blonde and have limited body hair so, other than the odd strand of long blonde hair in the bath, you never saw hair anywhere in our house.

My mother cleaned the bathroom herself, not trusting any of us girls to sufficiently remove any lurking germs. My father was not allowed to clean the bathroom either as my mother firmly believes that men can only see a germ once they reach the proportions of a medium sized dog.

Her moans of disgust floated down the passage and we all gathered in the doorway to determine the cause. From the bath and basin plugs, my mother was pulling thick clumps of long dark hair. There was also hair in the shower stall and clumps of the sticky strands lodged in the shower drain. My mother made short work of removing the offending hairs, wearing a pair of yellow plastic cleaning gloves and armed with a strong smelling drain cleaning fluid.

My sisters and I talked about that hair for weeks afterwards. We agreed the people who had occupied the house before us must have been very hairy. As our knowledge of the world was fairly limited at that time, we thought it very likely that Mr and Mrs Twit from Roald Dahl’s The Twits, had been the previous tenants of the house.

This was written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday. You can join in here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/14/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-dec-15-18/

Published by robertawrites235681907

I am a writer of young adult fiction and poetry

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30 thoughts on “#SOCS – Hairy”

  3. Ha! Robbie, what a terrific post. You slayed me with “men can only see a germ once they reach the proportions of a medium sized dog.”
    I’m rather like you and your family about hair (and my natural color is light blond). But for several years I wore it very long. Finally it hung long enough to cover my bottom and part of my thighs. So despite my efforts to prevent it getting into the drain, some always did. I had to periodically tug long masses of soap covered nasty hairballs out of the drain. That was gross enough… but to do that with someone else’s hair? As the “valley girls” used to say, gag me with a spoon! o_O LOL. Mega hugs.

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      1. At first it was an experiment Robbie, to disprove a very old “superstition” from my great-uncle. He refused to have a hair cut on a new moon (or during the half of the month when the moon is growing toward full). He said he wouldn’t get his money’s worth — because his hair would grow too fast.
        I asked him why and how that would be. He explained that farmers plated crops on the new moon (when he was younger) to ensure their growth. He said that the same thing worked for hair. Of course, teen me didn’t believe him, but ihat superstition stuck with me.
        Then during my marriage to psych-ex, I experienced trauma related hair loss. (There’s a long medical name that I never can remember… starts with a T.)
        My hair was already long — below my shoulders, but it had just become very thin.
        I didn’t have anything to lose. By then my great-uncle was long passed, but I decided to put his superstition to the test. Although I had to do it in reverse, intending to get faster hair growth, not slower.
        So, during the first few days of the new moon I trimmed my hair.
        The first new moon, I trimmed off a lot — having lost so much, it had become uneven.
        After that, each month, on the new moon, I trimmed off just the very edges… barely a 1/4 inch. (Sometimes more if I saw a lot of damage.)
        One would think it would get shorter. I had read that hair only grows a quarter inch a month. However, I kept at the practice for several months. I could see that it was not only getting longer faster, but thicker as well (recovering the lost hair). Now, anyone might think of all sorts of reasons why the lunar phases had nothing to do with it… but it worked for me.
        Now that I wear it short, I still find it grows a lot faster when, for convenience I happen to cut it during the new moon.
        Okay — that’s a long hair story (in more ways than one) going nowhere… Have a sublime Sunday.

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  4. “The Twits” I remember that was the first Roald Dahl book I randomly found on a shelf at the library. They were a hairy couple of twits weren’t they 🙂

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  9. Great post, Roberta! And eew. My husband is of the DIY sort, so he has extracted the nasty hair clumps from the drains. Ick. Then there’s the hair that gets caught before it slithers down the drain. That bit I can handle. 😉

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  10. I enjoyed your post, definitely one of the worst things about cleaning a bathroom that was previously used by others has to be the cleaning of the shower drain. A full on hazmat suit would probably have been in order for your Mom. Some of the comments from your readers were priceless as well. Whodathunk it that one should time the cutting of one’s hair to the phases of the moon? Wish I’d had THAT info 35 years or so ago! I think I’ll be back …

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