Ambushed by memories in the ribbon room

I am going to have a new purse made by the fabulous Laura Bee Designs, and needed to find a piece of ribbon for the trim. The place to go for ribbon in Seattle is Nancy's Sewing Basket, on the top of Queen Anne Hill. I used to live near there and visit often, but haven't been there in awhile, so I had forgotten how pleasant the ribbon room is -- a west-facing room with a window bringing lots of sun in.

Standing there looking at all the patterned ribbon, I flashed back to the days when I had really long hair. My mother had fine curly hair that she wore very short, but she insisted on keeping my hair long, straightening it with a heavy iron comb that she heated in the flames on the stove. And she took care of it every day of my life until I went off to boarding school. I don't know that this would have gone on so long if I had had sisters, but my other four siblings are all male, so there was only one head of hair on which my mother could lavish her attention. I would sit on the floor in front of her, and she would comb, braid, and tie it with ribbon -- no rubber bands for me! We moved a lot, and wherever we went -- Raleigh, Tunis, Montgomery, Kinshasa - she would hunt out a shop that sold fancy ribbon, and we would go and buy a wardrobe of ribbon for my hair. I couldn't have cared less about having long hair, but I loved the ribbons she used to buy to tie my braids.

It was a pain to take care of long hair, though, once I was in boarding school and had to deal with it myself. I gave up the ribbon pretty quickly -- too difficult to tie myself -- and resorted to leather barrettes with wood sticks through them, but my hair was not only long, but very thick, and routinely broke the wood sticks. I can't remember how long I put up with that, but eventually, I let someone in my dorm cut my hair... and that was the end of long hair and ribbons. My mother kept some of them for years -- I would come across them when I was rummaging through her fabric and notions -- but somewhere along the way they disappeared.

Standing in the ribbon room at Nancy's, I found it impossible to choose just one ribbon for my purse -- which I knew was going to be the case. The three ribbons at the bottom of the photo are the candidates for that. But I couldn't walk out without also buying a few inches of the two ribbons at the top of the picture. Not to wear in my hair -- which is now fine and curly and worn even shorter than my mother wore hers -- but to stitch into a quilt one day, a little reminder to myself of what it felt like to sit between my mother's knees while she combed and braided and tied my hair with fancy ribbon.