The Beauty Shop

My mom was a beautician. To those of you who had mother's who were beauticians, that sentence holds tons of meaning. It means that you get every new hair style tried out on you as well as all the new methods of waxing, tanning, exercising, hair colors... After all, someone has to be the guinea pig. It also means that your hair in your second grade picture may have been teased and sprayed. Oh yeah, someone knows what I mean!

My mom got a new beauty shop when the one she was working at closed down. It is a 14' x 32' Morgan building with heat/ac, a bathroom, a kitchen style sink. It had two "stations", three hair dryers (you know those chairs with the helmets attached that you stuck your head into at an unnatural, uncomfortable angle??), a couple of end tables with magazines, a book shelf of toys for kids, a book shelf of crafts for sale, and mom's "business desk". I can still picture exactly where every item was located and what it looked like. I know where the rollers were (you know those cylindrical things that you wrapped your hair around before you stuck your head in that horrible hot helmet), the clippies (those metal things to hold the cylindrical things to your hair that invariably got a piece of hair wrapped around some part and ripped out of your head when you were taking "down" the rollers), the hair sprays, colors, and curling irons. When I would come home to visit, I would spend hours in the shop, restyling hair, doing manicures, visiting old friends. We even celebrated Christmas in the shop a couple of times. Mom liked to put her tree and her ornament collection up at the shop for her customers to see, and so she could enjoy it while she worked. Mom's dream was always to retire, move the shop to my backyard, add a shower, and make it into an efficiency apartment. She never got that chance. After mom died, I moved the shop to my backyard cause I felt like it was worth something. I changed the name to The Crop Shop and loaded it up with paper, stamps, punches, inks... and viola, instant scrapbooking heaven.

Why is it that my family and I still call it The Beauty Shop?

I will tell my daughter to run out to the beauty shop and get something, or she will tell me that she is going to go play at the beauty shop. Even extended family still calls it the beauty shop. It couldn't look more different. The stations, rollers, dryers... have all been removed. It now has bookshelves full of stamps, tables to crop on, drawers full of stickers, punches, inks, paper...

While thinking about this the other day, I realized that the "Beauty Shop" is still an appropriate name. The beauty of friendship as we meet to crop or learn from each other. The beauty of creating, whether it be ink, paper, pictures, sewing... The beauty of relationships as my daughter and I play out there together and bond in the same way my mother and I bonded as she styled my hair or painted my nails. The beauty in giving and receiving.

This blog is titled Seeing the Beauty. I think I just found a little more beauty in my life.