An envisioning. October 2002, and seven o’clock in the morning at the house on Puffinball Island.

Oh to be here.

Life just darling with two pancake griddles going at once, each one with little pancakes spun out in a circle like a clock so the children can learn to tell time between episodes of Sesame Street. Not quite Swedish pancakes, the kind Grandmother made from a mix they had at the grocery store, but the closest thing to them that Martha Stewart knows about.

A husband off driving from one sales opportunity to another and coming back every third weekend with tales of little New England inns with chintz bed skirts with triple flounces and comforters and canopies to match along with detailed in-home reviews of every place with spaghetti and meatballs on the menu from one end of Maine to the other.

Tales of sea kayaking that enthrall the children, what with the lake having only one-inch waves that wouldn’t swamp an acorn shell bobbing along, too.

All of that grand and life in a place where you can go barefoot all summer without anyone saying something about walking on a pointy pine needle being precious and living where the trees stretch up until they almost block the sky, perfect.

But yet . . . stuck with hair held up with a pencil stuck through a barrette and no hairdresser who reads fashion magazines for miles let alone whatever the fancy salons in New York subscribe to to keep up with whatever the Beautiful People think is chic enough to walk the red carpet at Cannes . . . worth it but a bit hard if you once earned a living dressed up to the nines with your hair done by the best people in Manhattan . . . hard to remember exactly but sitting there for hours with three packets of bobby pins needed to effect it all but a look for summer with hair twisted around a foam ring and made into a hat with a tail end hanging down like Davy Crockett on television with his coonskin cap . . .

Both of these images are taken from a “Found photos from Hairstyles of The Rich and Famous of Tampa, Florida in the mid 1980” post on Flashbak.com. I got the idea from a PDF of my local newspaper in the same time period but these images are better, especially the first one. See that here https://flashbak.com/fabulous-snapshots-from-a-florida-hair-salon-in-the-1980s-440039/