My hair and my mother’s hair

In honor of Mother’s Day I wanted to share a quote from my favorite book, Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping. I understand it all too well:

 “Sylvie and I …could not leave that house, which was stashed like a brain, a reliquary, like a brain, its relic to be pawned and sorted and parceled out among the needy and the parsimonious of Fingerbone. Imagine the blank light of judgment falling on you suddenly. It would be like that. For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and insipient dreams, and many household things are of purely sentimental value, like the dim coil of thick hair, saved from my grandmother’s girlhood, which was kept in a hatbox on top of the wardrobe, along with my mother’s gray purse. In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves. They are turned into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned.”