I have a serious case of born-in-the-wrong-generation. While I know that life in 2010 has its perks, there is a part of me that has always longed for things like handwritten letters, dances on weekends, and long drives in cars without seatbelts. This longing is never more evident than during the visits I have with my grandmother. Although I don’t see her as frequently now that I spend most of the year away at school, I try to visit as often as I can. My favourite conversations are the ones about what her life was like when she was my age.

One particular evening, we were talking about hair – specifically, the things we do to curl it.

“We used to stick a six-inch nail right in the fire!” she said, holding her hands up to show me how long the nail was. Later, she told me about how her mother used to make rollers for my grandma and her sisters out of paper: “If you twist and twist and twist,” she said, making the motions with her fingers, “the paper gets stiff, and you can wrap your hair around it.”


“We used to wear rag curls, too. Do you know what those are?”

I smiled. I am very familiar with rag curls. I spent many evenings with my mom standing over me, wrapping my hair around strips of old towel or t-shirt until I had knots of fabric dangling all over my head. I always began with the hope that afterwards, I would look a little more glamorous and grown up – but the process inevitably ended with my looking like a poorly groomed poodle instead.

In photos of my grandma as a young woman, though, she always looks enviably classy and composed – all soft smiles and mysterious eyes and the kind of grace that refuses to suffer the indignity of unkempt hair. After I left her house that evening, I was determined to give rag curls another chance. If she could do it, so could I.

All I needed, really, was a little patience. Rag curls involve wrapping sections of hair around a long piece of fabric, and tying that fabric in a knot to keep the curl in place. The end result is usually very tight ringlets. I’ve found, however, that putting your hair in curls when it’s dry, rather than wet, keeps them from being too crazy. It also helps to give yourself a lot of time for the curls to loosen. Instead of poodle hair (which I’m sure has its moments as well), I’ve started to end up with soft and lasting curls.

Rag rolls appeal not only to the part of me that wishes my hopelessly straight hair would stay curled for longer than five minutes, but also to the part that wishes I could have gone to dances every weekend and waited for letters in a mailbox instead of my inbox. I know that the past has flaws, but my grandmother’s generation is one that I still long to understand. My evening visits help me feel closer to my grandmother, and being able to relate to her stories about curls connects me, in the smallest way, to the girl she was before I knew her.

- Hailey Siracky

For me, summertime has always been about projects. As the school year winds down, I begin to make lists in my head of all the ways I want to spend my time: I will read nothing but Jane Austen novels, I will photograph something every day, I will teach myself to sew. Sometimes I accomplish these things, and sometimes I don’t – but every year, I begin the summer with a hopeful bunch of plans and although I’ve never managed to complete them all, I’ve also never ignored my list completely. I may not do everything, but I always do something, and the break is a little more interesting because of it.

This summer, the project at the top of my list was tie-dye. I don’t know what possessed me. I’ve always been sort of indifferent to the aesthetic. I have owned exactly two pieces of tie-dyed clothing in my life: One was an oversized t-shirt I dyed at summer camp when I was seven, and the other was a pink and purple shirt I bought on sale on a family vacation last summer. I’ve neither loved nor hated either of these pieces of clothing. Sometimes a shirt is just a shirt. Multicoloured swirls and I had no real relationship - happy, sad or otherwise.

So how, on a Saturday evening in June, did I find myself crouched in my backyard, soaking a white t-shirt in a container of purple dye? I have no idea. But it happened, and it will probably happen again. I had so much fun.

The whole process was pretty basic. I took a cotton t-shirt, wrapped pieces of it in rubber bands, and then stuck it in a container full of RIT clothing dye. I ended up dyeing a few other things as well – the most exciting of those being a set of pillowcases, although I have yet to use them because I have a fear of waking up with my face all splotched with yellow and red and blue. I did my dyeing the cheap and easy way, but there are a lot of ways to get really serious about your hand dyeing, too. The best website I found while researching was this one which provides really detailed explanations of different dyes and fabrics and techniques (including one called Batik, which is a resist dyeing technique that uses wax).

I ended up with a pretty great shirt – and maybe by the end of the summer, I’ll have dyed a few more. But even though the clothing was kind of the point, the t-shirt feels like more of an added bonus to the whole tie-dye experience. I am happy to have a new shirt or two – but I am even happier to have had an evening sitting in the grass, my hands covered in dye, excitedly unwrapping freshly-coloured fabric and anticipating the results. With this project, I wasn’t in it for the clothing as much as I was for the sunshine and the laughter and the clothesline full of brightly coloured fabric strung up from the fence.

But, the clothes are cool, too.

- Hailey Siracky

I have been looking for some sort of summer hat. In my daydreams, a floppy-brimmed sunhat does the trick nicely. I went as far as to visit a hat store a few weeks ago, plucking hat after hat off the racks and, inevitably, sighing and returning hat after hat back where it belonged – far away from my head. The last hat I tried on could have, I think, been perfect – but in the end I returned that one to the shelf, too. I wondered if it would be the sort of thing I bought while feeling hopeful and brave and then, once I was at home and faced with actually having to wear it out into the world, would chicken out.

I bought a hat this past winter. It was a little burgundy cloche and, at the time, it seemed like a nice way to ease myself into the hat world – it wasn’t too conspicuous, and it made me feel pretty classy. I wore it often and I felt stylish more than I ever felt uneasy. But, even then, every time I stepped out the door I was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that very few people wear hats anymore. My philosophy when it comes to fashion is, generally, not to care too much about what other people think – but where hats are concerned, maybe because hat wearing seems like some sort of lost art, I can’t help it. I care.

I think my obsession may have begun with my hat-wearing neighbour. I visited with her one night last fall, and watched in awe as she pulled hat after hat out of her closet, full of stories about where they came from and where she wore them and who she was with when it happened. I was amazed at how, decades and decades later (she is well into her seventies), every hat was still in excellent shape. I kept thinking, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to do this with my grandchildren (or grand-neighbours, as the case may be). I decided then and there that I was going to become a hat person. But it’s proving to be more of a challenge than I thought.

As far as my elusive summer hat goes, my most recent decision on the matter is this: I am going to ease myself into things all over again. I have started with the headscarf. So far, it’s working out rather well. Headscarves, too, are a form of headgear I’ve always admired from afar but been a bit wary of trying out on my own. But, depending on the day, a scarf makes me feel like a pirate or a biker or bohemian or some terrifyingly awesome combination of the three. I could get used to this.

And, if I can get used to this, I will get used to a sunhat, too.

It may take a while, but I’ll become a hat person yet. Just wait.

- Hailey Siracky

The last time my mom made the drive from our small prairie town to visit me at university, she brought some bad news.

“Hailey,” she said, gravely. “The thrift store is closing.”

Witnesses say the look on my face would have made the devil himself feel sorry for me.

* * * * *

I have a serious attachment to the Elk Island Thrift Store. It opened the in the spring of my Grade 11 year, in the midst of a particularly awkward phase of my existence. Being sixteen in a small town is difficult in that your pool of peers is very small and fairly homogeneous. Sometimes it seems like the only way to survive is to try to be like everybody else, and even if you’re not called out for being different, the tiniest deviation from the norm is painfully obvious. For a girl who had little interest in the jeans-and-t-shirts norm, but who was also fairly shy and uneasy with attention, getting dressed felt like a struggle between wearing what I liked and trying to blend in. Until the thrift store opened, my decisions were simple in that my fashion resources were scant. But then -

It started with a small collection of secretary blouses. These became a staple in my high-school wardrobe. I wore them often with jeans and a pair of fairly enormous boots. I began, also, to build a collection of oversized sweaters, usually with crazy patterns. One of my favourite items was a cream-coloured cardigan, crocheted (I think?) with an intricate pattern around the collar. A year after I bought it, I wore it to my art class and got paint smeared on the sleeve. It wouldn’t come out, but I wore the sweater anyway – and even now, I cannot bear to part with it. Sometimes I push up the sleeves and hope nobody notices, and other times I wear the sleeves down and hope nobody cares.

The following summer, the store decided to hire an employee (only one), and I got the job. I spent every day sorting through bags of donations, dressing mannequins and talking with the regulars. The owner, understanding my love of clothing, began to save me things she thought I’d like. At the end of the summer, she presented me with an enormous bag full of dresses – most of them handmade, and mostly from the 70’s. She had doubts about whether or not the clothes would sell, and could trust that I would appreciate them. She was one of the first in a large web of people in my life with whom I could share an understanding of the necessity of good clothing going to good homes.

When I profess my sadness at the thrift store’s closing – and I do it often, and without much reservation – my despair falls on bewildered ears. “It’s just a store,” people say. Or, “It sounds like a great place.” And it is a great place, but I will miss it for more than just that. The Elk Island Thrift store taught me how to be cool. Whether I was finding secondhand dresses or oversized sweaters or my first instant camera, so many of the things I’ve come to love - the things that make me feel like me – came first from this quiet little shop. The thrift store was the beginning of my appreciation for all things secondhand and vintage, but, more importantly, also of my understanding that being cool didn’t mean being like everybody else – wisdom that has made getting dressed in the morning far more fun.

- Hailey Siracky