You Never Can Tell What a Redheaded Woman Will Do

I was the third of four children and three of us had red hair. My sister Lorraine was what was called a “dishwater blonde.” She wasn’t happy with being different, and often shed tears over her outcast station, as she saw it.
“Was I adopted?” she asked our Mother one day, large tears streaming down her cheeks. “”Why am I different?”
Mother tried to reassure her and boost her morale. “No, of course not,” she said soothingly. “You are my own child, just like the others. But don’t feel bad. At least you have a pretty face. Just look – redheads always have freckles.” And she glanced my way, as if noting my unhappy state of freckledom.
Thanks, Mommy dearest. I needed that. I needed it like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Why didn’t you tell the whole story? You could have mentioned allergies to every known brand of soap and shampoo, exzema and skin rashes, hay fever and wheezing, sneezing and coughing all night. Why didn’t you talk about insomnia, sleep walking and obsessive-compulsion disorder? Not that these were all caused by my red hair, but it is well known that red-haired people have sensitive skin and are subject to allergies of every kind. But if you wanted to make me sorry I had curly red hair, you failed utterly. I have never regretted my redheaded state and wish my hair had stayed red longer.
I got a lot of mileage out of that red hair. Strangers would stop us on the street and comment on my curly mop. My Aunt Doris, then a teenager, (I was about six) would wash my hair with special shampoos and set it in what was known as “Marcelle waves,” My grandma, herself a redhead, would bake me special cookies and let me have her sewing scraps to make clothes for my doll. My Uncle Lewis took me to the circus and showed me off as his “Orphan Annie” girl. If memory serves me right, he also bought me a box of Cracker Jacks. No wonder my sister was jealous. No attention was directed at her lanky brown hair whatsoever. I suppose she got over it after while.
I looked up redheaded people on Google. Only two percent of the world population have red hair. A large proportion of them are in Scotland and Scandinavia. Redheads are purported to be adventurous, passionate, quick tempered, and sensitive to pain. Redheaded women are seen as remantic and given to sexual excesses. I might modestly state that none of those myths applies to me except the tendency to be adventurous. I not only admit to being adventurous but I brag about it. As the old blues song says “You never can tell what a redheaded woman will do.”
Well, what did I do? I climbed an apple tree when I was four and got hung hung up between two limbs and had to be rescued by my mother. I helped my father paint the woodshed with red paint and got so much paint in my hair that part of it had to be cut off. I wrote on the side of the house with crayons and the words I wrote were still visible years later . When I was fourteen I sneaked out of the house one moonlit night and went swimming with the two neighbor boys. All pretty innocent pranks, really. But Mother could recite them like a litany when the mood struck, and I grew up thlnking I was an incorrigible miscreant.
I had my moments of triumph. When I graduated from grade school, I won the gold medal for scholarship, beating out all the other eighth graders in the county and astounding my teacher, for whom it was a total surprise. As indeed it was for me. I was awarded a scholarship to college, and when I was seventeen I took myself off and never looked back. And of course I committed the ultimate act of adventure and joined the army during the war.
All in all, it has been a great life. I have never regretted having red hair. Mother dear, if you are looking down on me now, I hope you know that my freckles don’t bother me a bit. Don’t now and never did. As an old flame once said, “A face without freckles is like a sky without stars.” Rest in peace.