At first I didn’t mind the color changing in my hair, but after a few years, I was self-conscious about showing a part. The gray was more a dun color, as if something was leaking away. I looked tired and sad even when I wasn’t.

On a visit to Philadelphia, my art school student daughter took me to a salon she knew and urged me to let the stylist do her thing. I had my hair trimmed, and gave in to a rinse that would wash out in six weeks or so. The test won me over. That night, my daughter and I sat on her bed watching TV, both of us patting my soft hair every once in a while.

Now I do it myself. The coloring task is a small nuisance, but infrequent—a half hour out of a morning every couple of months. Each time there’s a moment when I look in the mirror and see my mother, and I let myself sink for a little while into a sweet, melancholy reverie. Then it’s time to rinse, and I shake away the memory before it hurts too much.

My mother, Edith, was a blonde. Photographs of her into her adolescence show her with hair so pale the light seems to be glowing through it. In young adulthood, the color softened to a pretty, ashy blonde, the texture thick and lustrous. She was ill, though, off and on, all through her twenties, and her hair thinned and broke off, and the color dulled. I was nine or ten when she finally gave up and cut it short. That made it easier for her to lighten it, using a kind of paste she made of shampoo and peroxide. She would never have had it done professionally. We were living in public housing, barely making ends meet.

I remember noticing the yellow color one summer day after my eighth grade.

I had asked her what a French kiss was. After she had told me gently and honestly, she had tried to lighten my mood with a little teasing, and I was embarrassed and insulted. I ran outside and rode my bike furiously around and around the block in the searing West Texas heat until I was tired. When I stopped in front of the house , I saw her standing in the door, waiting for me; the sunlight was glinting off her brassy hair. I remember thinking: She’s not as pretty as she used to be.

A day or two after New Years, 1959, she and I were passing time in her bedroom, where she almost always was. She had been seriously ill for many months and her "good days" were few and far between. I was a junior in high school, newly aware of boys and style, longing to show my mother that I was growing up.

I sat against the headboard while she lay propped on pillows, reading, and I noticed that her stiff hair was showing roots. I offered to help her bleach it. She sat up and said that she thought that was a great idea. Her sudden enthusiasm inspired me further: I declared that I wanted to do my hair, too! She said we had a little Christmas money, so we went to the drugstore to buy a Lady Clairol kit.

I don’t know if there were any other such products, but I remember the Clairol ads vividly, with the pictures of a mother and daughter. The idea was that with the help of hair coloring, a woman could return her hair to the shade of her own childhood, and thereby match her daughter’s. We joked about how we didn’t fit the ad. I wanted my hair to be like my mother’s; we spoke of it as if it were her "old" hair, her beautiful hair.

And that day, when we were through, it was. We chose a light strawberry blonde shade. I used a toothbrush to apply lotion to her roots. The smell was strong, but everything about what we were doing was fun. She was tired when I started on my own hair, but she watched and she talked to me about how when I was a little girl, she would take me downtown all dressed up, and people would stop her to say how pretty I was. I had been pale-haired as a child but now had a light brown tint that lightened easily and I suppose I believed that I was going to be that beautiful girl again for my mother.

My hair was shoulder length; I restyled my bangs, cutting deeper into the crown so that they sat on my head like an upside-down dish. I loved it when I was finished; we stood side by side in front of the mirror, clasping hands, admiring ourselves.

When she died in March, the roots were showing again, and when I looked at her in the coffin and saw how they had styled her hair I cried. I made my aunt take me to buy Lady Clairol again, and I touched up my own hair before the funeral.

I kept my hair blond, like my mother’s, for years and years after. In college, I had a roommate who was a beautician and we bleached my hair almost white. Later I went to a light ash blond, but it wasn’t until the summer I traveled in Europe on the cheap that I finally gave up my life as a blonde. I was in a seacoast town near Rome and there was nothing in the drugstore that I recognized. I couldn’t afford to go to a salon, and suddenly, in a torrent of tears, I decided to let my hair grow out. I had it cut at a barber’s in the Jean Seberg style—a "pixie"—and kept cutting it like that until it was all brown.

My daughter has her father’s hair, thick and dark, with auburn highlights, but she’s like me in other ways. Everyone remarks that we look more like one another every day. I try to shrug it off, in case she minds, but secretly my throat swells with pride every single time someone says it.

I want to be my mother and my daughter and myself, all at once. I want that day back, when my mother and I giggled and dripped goo on our shoulders and came out like a Lady Clairol ad. I want to sit beside my daughter like I did that day in Philadelphia when I took her advice and both of us were glad. One day, when the gray has taken over, I’m going to go blond again, and I’m going to ask my daughter to do the honors. I think that will bring everything together, once and for all.