Heather and Her Auburn Hair

I once knew a girl named Heather. We first met in college, in a class. Heather was a tall and shapely girl with auburn hair, which I liked very much. She later told me that her mom was Irish and her dad was German. “No wonder the hair color!” I thought at the time.

After each class, when everyone else had gone, we would stay behind and exchange kisses. There was a park not far from campus. Sometimes we would drive to the park, walk in the woods, embrace, and lose ourselves in kisses.

After she graduated from college, she went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, and I never heard from her again. I also moved on. From time to time, I thought of Heather, her beautiful hair, and those long, breathless kisses we shared in the woods and empty classrooms.

Every time I thought of her, Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene, Jolene” would start to play in my head:

Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green.
Your smile is like a breath of spring,
Your voice is soft like summer rain.

I was pretty sure auburn was the color of her hair until several years ago, when I was rereading one of my favorite Chekhov stories, The House with the Mezzanine. This passage caught my eye:

“By the white-stone gate surmounted with stone lions, which led from the yard into the field, stood two girls. One of them, the elder, thin, pale, very handsome, with masses of chestnut hair and a little stubborn mouth, looked rather prim and scarcely glanced at me; the other, who was quite young—seventeen or eighteen, no more, also thin and pale, with a big mouth and big eyes, looked at me in surprise, as I passed, said something in English and looked confused, and it seemed to me that I had always known their dear faces. And I returned home feeling as though I had awoke from a pleasant dream.”

For the first time, I started to doubt my own memory. Maybe Heather had chestnut hair, like Lydia in Chekhov’s story, and not auburn hair, as I had always remembered.

Well, it makes little sense to dwell on a matter as elusive as memory.

Here is a poem by Emily Dickinson, which I love dearly, that mentions Heather—not the girl I once kissed, but the tough plant that thrives in the moors of Scotland and Ireland:

I never saw a Moor,
I never saw the Sea;
Yet know I how the Heather looks,
And what a Billow be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in Heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot,
As if the Checks were given.

[Emily Dickinson, circa 1865]