A Mid-Life Summer's Whimsy

Lately I have been thinking about my march toward fifty. Do I want to hear a drum roll, violins, or a bluebird whispering in my ear? I think I’ll go for the bluebird.

Do you know how the bluebird got its color? A Cherokee legend says that the bluebird was so awed by the beauty of a blue lake that it dipped in and out of it for five days, turning from white to blue on the last day. That same legend explains why the coyote is mud colored. While the bluebird was drawn to the natural beauty of the lake, the coyote was vain. Thinking it would look great in blue, it coveted the color of the bluebird. Focusing on appearances, the coyote got distracted and fell into a muddy ditch instead of the lake.

My own hair is now muddy instead of golden, muddy blonde with white streaks. Age, like that ditch the coyote fell in, has a way of teaching you not to be vain about crowning glories. I have to admit that I like watching my hair slowly turn white. A Creek saying alleges that white hair indicates the creator is whispering in your ear of the afterlife. My mother’s hair turned completely white the year she watched her first child, my brother John, pass over. He was twenty-one.

It’s very sad when somebody young dies. I have been blessed with a longer life, a life marked by a will to accomplish some of the things my brother wanted. I haven’t been to Paris yet, but I’ve seen a lot of the world, and Washington County, and I’ve had a chance to marry. The happiest event of my life, the birth of my son Guy, has helped me to reclaim some of the innocence I lost watching my brother suffer and die.

My son is a freckle-faced boy. Watching him grow and accumulate more freckles, I have come to trust life all over again. Philosophically speaking, his freckles represent the innocence of my own freckle-faced childhood when I marveled at life, like a beautiful blue lake, before me. They’re also cute. Did you know that if you wash your face in the wheat dew of May, you can wash your freckles off? If you don’t live near a wheat field, you can snip off the appendages at the base of dandelion leaves and soak them in alcohol to make an astringent. Short of that, you can buy some potion at the store. The world is as full of cures for freckles as it is mud.

An Irish legend has it that freckles are left by fairies who bless you. Genetically speaking, freckles are a dominant trait. One could say that my son has freckles because of Irish forebears, not fairies. Because my mother has had such a time with skin cancer, I wore sunscreen so long that I lost touch with my freckles. Sure, there were age spots to compensate, but that’s not the same. When I looked into a mirror, I saw a woman of a certain age. I was glad to be living a long life, but did I have to get old? Some women, and men, look into the mirror and decide to dye their hair. Others start saving for BOTOX® injections. I wanted freckles.

I wasn’t like the coyote, mind you. I didn’t want freckles out of vanity so I’d be cute like my son. Like the bluebird that gazed into the lake and wanted to wear its beauty, I gazed into my son’s face and wanted to wear his joie de vivre. So one morning I got up and just didn’t use sunscreen, and I had a lot of sunscreen not to use: sunscreen with moisturizers, tinted sunscreen, non-chemical sunscreen, high SPF sunscreen, even night cream with sunscreen. I quit powdering my face too. Why spend so much time hiding my partially Irish face from fairies?

The first night, after a day spent outside, saw progress. Four days later, I happened to glance in the mirror. There were more! Within a few weeks, some freckles returned—not the whole face-load, but enough to remind me of the little girl grinning behind the adult face. I wasn’t so old after all. Until my freckles fade, because I’m sensible enough to be wearing sunscreen again, I will enjoy my reunion with every one of them. I won’t even mash wild strawberries from the yard to hasten their departure.

In fact, if I begin to follow the advice of nutritionists who suggest ageing adults get more sun to benefit their skeletal systems, they may not fade so quickly. Sitting in the sun unprotected for five minutes now and then does seem to liberate my old joie de vivre. It could be Vitamin D, or it could be that outside I’m forced to look away from my mirror into a marvelous world unfolding, like a beautiful blue lake, before me.

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 16 July 2003, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2003.