Cold Crown

I'm going blonde - blonder. Even my mother finally asked, tentatively, "Are you using a rinse?"
It's a strange artifact of long stress followed by later happiness. I started to go white fairly early on, and swore never to dye, tint, color or rinse. I had reasons - a beloved elementary school librarian with snow-white hair in her 30s, my grandmother also gone white very young. And a distant female relative who ran a publishing house she founded and built up herself, not one inherited or shared. She was tall and imperious and single and white-haired, and sent boxes at Christmas filled with books, paper and other oddments from her business. So, I watched the snows gather, occasionally reminded of the poem I cannot seem to find this morning that writes of a woman coming out in public with her hair magnificently un-tinted, "wearing her first cold crown."
But after years of white, the many good changes of recent years have made some kind of unexpected reversal. The white hair has darkened or disappeared in favor of blonde, and I'm almost at the color my hair was as a teenager, when I'd brush it out to dry in the sun. There remains a small swatch of white at the front, a reminder - memento mori? - that this, too, shall pass.