freckles.
I'm participating in a 31-day blogging challenge called reverb10, responding to writing prompts that are designed to elicit reflections on 2010, and hopes for 2011. You can find out more about it here. I am challenging myself to respond to each prompt in 15 minutes or less.
Today's challenge: Beautifully Different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful.
Freckles.
In "Pied Beauty," poet Gerard Manley Hopkins speaks to me, all that care to praise dappled, freckled things. I remember reading that poem for the first time in college, and for the first time seeing my insanely freckled self as holding beauty. Up until then, it was simply a body that wouldn't tan, in a culture in which beauty was tanned, beach-going, carefree in the sun.
I was the child–and teenager–on the beach in a long-sleeved white shirt, with a tiny clear plastic noseguard attached to my thick glasses, a noseguard under which a layer of zinc oxide blocked the sun. I had no carefree days on the beach that didn't result in burns, blisters, hot stiff ache. Pure heat from the inside out, sometimes so fiercely burned that I couldn't wear clothing.
I went to a camp at a college for a month in the sixth grade, and at the graduation ceremony, the other people in the camp learned that my name was Patti. Until then, they had simply called me Big Red, after one boy yelled that at me at orientation. Big Red, long thick red hair streaming behind me as I clogged and played the mountain dulcimer.
My hair was orange, my skin fiercely dappled. I tried desperately to connect the freckles to create a tan. I used horrible orange "tanning solution" to stain my legs a shade suspiciously matching the color of my hair. I longed, LONGED for a tan like Libby Robinson had.
I was the dappled one, the imperfect one.
What do I miss, now that I am older, my hair white for many years now, going white prematurely as so many redheads do?
I miss my orange hair and those freckles, strong bold splotches of self on my face, my arms, self-conscious, though I was.
But now I am bold in other ways, and still dappled, with much light and, yes, much dark. And still self-conscious, in other ways.
