6/27/11 – Gorgeous moment at the barbershop in Middlebury. Just before me was an elderly couple, a rather tall, angular man and his tiny, bird-like wife. She was the hair cut candidate, a woman of 85 or 90, well under five feet tall, arms like pale twigs descending from her short sleeves. She cannot have weighed 90 pounds. With great, touching solicitude her husband took her arm and guided her from where she was seated up onto the barber’s chair. Her hair was close cropped all over, like a man’s, and spikey on top, like the kind of do currently in style among with-it metro males. I could not see what needed cutting. As the barber, a very nice, weathered Vermont woman in her fifties, began tentatively to snip, her husband chimed in from his chair: “She sure liked that last hair cut you gave her, all she could talk about.” To which the little woman made some kind of humming assent. As the barber worked on, snipping and patting, she became more and more solicitous, her voice dropping to softer and softer levels. The constellation of the three of them—husband, barber, and wife—generated an enveloping atmosphere of love and gratitude and care. It was impossible not to feel it or to see it in the eyes of all three. It was easy to imagine that frail woman not living another day. Held in the kind of feeling hovering about her, that would be fine.

from On My Way Out: A Reflection On Closure by Richard Hawley (Orchises Press)