It’s the Friday before New Year’s Eve and I’ve already had a good day in the salon. One head only needed tweaking on a haircut that was really working for her. Two clients let me design new 'dos for entering 2012 more boldly. I was precisely placing caramel highlights to deflect attention from the graceful graying of corkscrewed curly-que’s streaming down my client's back. It was just another day at the salon - unless your salon happens to be part of a compound that includes your home and one other unlikely partner: a farm.
On this particular day my son was on winter break, quietly noodling on the IPhone he inherited from the fortuitous timing of Christmas and an upgrade. I’m grateful to Santa for earphones and the bi-fold doors that separate our worlds. Fourteen now, he was raised on the other side of this Great Divide between my work and a home gracious folks call ‘lived in’. However, he hasn’t outgrown the occasional slip of interrupting me for an unwilling-to-be-delayed gratification that is usually met with “The Look”. I was almost done for the day when the bi-fold doors creaked opened. I prepared to muster said ‘look’ but was met with another that said ‘something’s wrong’. Pointing towards the picture window, just outside of it - on the salon side of the yard - were three not-so-little pigs. I huffed and puffed and blew a gasket, issuing stealthy orders to call his Dad and coax them back to their side of the Great Divide - or at least track their whereabouts until his Dad got home.
Collecting myself, I went back to corkscrewed curly-Q’s I could deal with. My client chuckled at yet another indication that this was not your typical salon. Shortly thereafter I was back in ‘the zone’ – that happy place uninhabited by pigs, teenagers or anything else in the world but me and the hair. Once the caramel highlights had receded down the driveway, I scurried off to find my son, grabbing a bag of small red potatoes intended for tonight’s rack of lamb dinner. I found Avery and the 3 escapees at the top of the hill on a treeless plateau formerly used for a large garden.
Surprisingly, the pigs weren’t interested in food, being perfectly happy to meander and nose-plow virgin territory. We tried to curtail their wandering into the thick surrounding woods by using long dead tree branches in a bad imitation of what we’d seen 4H kids do at Auction. My suggestion to rope them was squelched by Avery’s lampooning of me being garden plowed behind a 400 lb. runaway pig. Finally we coaxed them onto a two-track encircling the garden that led downhill towards the barn. I got ahead of them and inspiration came. Picture the scene in “Funny Girl” where Fanny Brice lets it rip at the helm of a ferry in New York harbor, only nix Babs and insert me belting out “SOOEEEYY!" at the helm of a muddy two track. Miraculously, the pigs started following me. We pied-pipered our way down the hill, through the narrow doorway of the lower barn and into a stall, Avery bringing up the rear. Was it luck, will power or my inner Streisand? Perhaps it was the curious fashion pairing of my magenta merino and cashmere skirt and muddy Sorrell boots. All I know is that by the end of it all aggravation had subsided into the satisfaction: three more wayward corkscrewed curly-que’s had been manipulated back in place.
