…was an indescribable color. Red-head just doesn’t come close. Besides, red always makes me think of tomatoes. Like a fire agate, it was unmatched and heterogenic in its hues, or like burnished copper, resplendent in its patina. Sometimes, over the years, it was like the deep siennas of Sedona’s red rocks or bleached by the sun like a bright new penny.

As a child it was much lighter—strawberry blonde they called it—and it turned heads from the outset. You lightened it from time to time as a young adult, and cancer treatment changed its saturation for a time, too, but you came to embrace its natural iridescence as you did your own, with effortless grace and gratitude.

It never failed to tickle me when we were out and about and a stranger’s eyes would flash on the sight of you, marveling at your unexpected beauty. “In your dreams,” I’d think.