In the spring of her senior year at Herrin High School, Nancy Hampleman had a baby on a Friday. The following weekend, she went to prom. The weekend after that, she graduated.

She tells it with a laugh. It was wild. It was hers. And she wouldn't change it.

Nancy graduated in 1989. The year before, a junior, she'd met Jerry at a party in Sesser — she'd been stood up for a date in Herrin and a girlfriend drove her to console her. They got married that October. 

Flipped a coin to see whether she'd move to Sesser for her senior year or he'd come to Herrin. He came. But she spent a few months at Sesser High anyway, and then — eight months pregnant — came back.

"I wanted to graduate from my hometown," she said. "So I came back."

She did. And that senior year, incidentally, was when she pulled straight A's.

"I didn't have anything else to do," she said. "So I had to study."

After graduation, the young family moved to Goreville. Jerry played basketball at Shawnee Community College. Nancy enrolled in cosmetology school in Marion — eighteen months to complete it — and went to work at Charisma salon in Herrin. When she couldn't build a clientele there, she went to the Regis at the Carbondale mall, built one, and came back. Then, at twenty-three, broke and pregnant with her second son, she opened her own place downtown on Park Avenue. She called it Eclipse.

"We had no health insurance. We had nothing," she said. "We were searching the couch cushions for change to put gas in the car."

Eclipse ran for twelve years. Then she bought her own building in Energy, Illinois. Twenty years later, Hair Bangers has thirteen hairdressers on staff, and Nancy is the one managing all of them.

The pool in the backyard was not part of the original blueprint.

Life has had other chapters alongside the salon. She and Jerry coached fifth and sixth-grade basketball for about ten years at Our Lady Mount Carmel School in Herrin. They played in a rock band. She did CrossFit and triathlons until her body said otherwise, then found yoga — and kept going. She is now 500-hour trained, teaches two or three times a week at a studio in Marion, and describes it as a transformation that goes well beyond fitness.

"If you talked to people who knew me a long time ago, they'd tell you: don't mess with her," she said. "I'm just such a different person now."

Yoga led her to meditation, and meditation led her somewhere she hadn't expected: stillness.

"Just to sit with yourself and be quiet is one of the hardest things you'll ever do in your life," she said. "And it is the best thing you can do for yourself."

The anxiety she'd carried since childhood — borderline clinical, she suspects, by today's standards — is something she now recognizes and manages. Her advice to her younger self would be simple: "Chill out a little bit. Live in the moment."

At Herrin High, her favorite teacher was Judy Keener, her art teacher. "She treated me like I was her own," Nancy said. Softball coach Bruce Jilek had a different method — he'd grab her hands and tell her, "Cold hands belong to a smoker." She was wild, she admits freely. He reined her in. Both left marks.

Jerry and Nancy have been together 37 years, a fact that still pleases her enormously. "We knew the odds were crazy against us," she said. "2% of people married after high school make it. But we were competitive. We wanted to prove everyone wrong."

Two sons — both hardworking, both good cooks and good husbands, she notes with pride. She taught them to earn early; they were mowing lawns at thirteen. Her own parents had done the same. Her father was a state trooper who died in 2006. Her mother, now eighty-seven, was a Herrin High graduate herself and still living.

Two weeks before this conversation, Nancy became a grandmother. The baby is in Louisville. She's already been on the road.

It's a new season, and she's ready for it. She went to Spain this year. 

Aruba is coming. She fell in her pool recently — phone and all — and spent forty-eight hours without it, and found it glorious. She hasn't really gone back to social media since.

"It's not what I talk about," she said. "It's how I live my life."