Secrets in Our Skin

 "Like the night before I found her naked and sitting on the edge of her bed. Unaware I was there, she continued to massage her legs, their blue-green veins twisting beneath her skin...In the folds and creases, I saw her history. Her skin was the diary of her soul. All the springs she had watched the flowers bloom. The summers she had stood before the moon and kissed its face. The autumns she had grown wiser. The winters that had frozen the initials of her name. Each wrinkle was a record of this and of every hour, minute, and second she had lived. All her secrets were written in her skin. The things she had asked God for. The things she had cursed the devil about. In such age before me, I saw only beauty."

-from the book Betty by Tiffany McDaniel

I thought this passage was just beautiful. It made me stop and re-read it again aloud. 

 

To think how as we age, or watch our parents and grandparents and children age, that we start to contemplate where we are all headed. We start to not want to look in the mirror at ourselves. We see photos of us years ago and wonder where that person has gone, without all the wrinkles and folds. We begin to hide our veins, wrinkles, folds, and sun spots beneath make-up and clothing. We fear the way things will change and some of us will even surgically change the way we look to remain youthful, to deceitfully delay the inevitable. 

 

 But this. All of this. The blue-green veins, the wrinkles, the folds, the age spots are all the results of witnessing a life full of memories and adventures and moments in time. They are not a thing to hide, regret, or deny. 

 

You may when you read this, start to see us, your parents aging, and be taken aback. You might 20 years after that, read this once again, collecting your memories from your younger years and wishfully dream you could go back in time. I know. I have been there too. You might be in your 40's as I am now, writing this and be thinking how you have aged both in wisdom, your looks, your interests. But I hope you see it all as growth, as beauty of all the seasons you have been around to witness. 

 

May we all be blessed to have lived a life long enough to see a few secrets hidden in our skin.