I Can Make Anything Pretty

When I was a little girl, I was shipped off to West Virginia in the summers to stay with my Grandma Georgie. A lifelong smoker, I thought my grandma was 100 years old during those handful of magical summers when, in fact, she was maybe just ten years older than I am now. I french braided her hair, an achievement that surprised us both, as she kept it in a super tight perm that clung tightly to her head. Who knew she even had that much hair!? She taught me how to sew. Not on Sunday, though. Which is so hilariously dogmatic in retrospect from a woman who did not make us get up and go to church on Sundays and, to my knowledge, never read the Bible. (Perhaps the Bible comment makes me the dogmatic one.) But Grandma Georgie was a Southern Baptist in her heart, and sewing on Sunday was a sin, and she was not about to let her granddaughter go to hell on behalf of a craft project. One summer she altered my mom’s old prom dress to fit 8-year-old me. I remember grabbing the front of my hair, shaping it into a high crescent with my little hands, and spraying it until it was solid with a bottle of Aqua Net. I stood in front of the full-length mirror that was leaned against the wall in my aunt’s old bedroom and thought, “You are the hottest thing to ever walk this hollar.”