Shiny Lotion

It all started one morning when I was comfortably seated on the toilet.  I happened to look down and discovered my hands.  Overnight my 30 something year old hands had transformed from the long slender fingers with a laissez-faire home manicure I had taken for granted, to my Grandma Mary’s hands!  What? This was crazy.  Embarrassingly many hours were devoted over the next week reexamining my hands in different light and in many mirrors to confirm that things had changed while I wasn’t paying attention.

My knuckles had way too much skin accumulating around them forming bumpy pools of soft skin moguls. Thick purple caterpillar shaped veins creeped and wiggled from my wrist to my fingers.  My skin had texture and not the glowing good kind.  This new texture had an all over grass cloth look to it. When the heck had all this happened?

After I WebMD myself to be sure that I did not have some strange Benjamin Button age accelerating disease, I moved on to stage 2.  I am a glass half full type of girl so I spent a large part of the next week remembering how much I loved my Grandma Mary’s hands.  I actually remembered playing with her caterpillar veins! I would love to hold her hand and pet her soft perfumed skin.  My Grandma Mary was a 4’5” petite powerhouse! She could bake and garden right up there with Martha Stewart while raising 4 children as a young widow. She rocked it as a career woman in the 1960’s.  She worked in the jewelry section of an old-fashioned department store.  It was the kind of store with a lunch counter and chocolate display case. Grandma Mary was my mentor before I even knew what the role encompassed. So, if my newly discovered hands were my introduction to aging, I vowed to try to do it Grandma Mary’s way with grace and humor.

So, at thirty something I started putting sunscreen on for real, not just on a few select body parts. I was always pretty good about wearing hats and sunglasses, but now I embraced these accessories as fun fashion. Most importantly I discovered shiny lotion.  I made promise to myself to do the best I could to take care of my body with nutrition and exercise and to cover all the parts I could not change with rays of sunshine and grace – shiny lotion. 

I try to love my skin in all the new forms it takes.  It is just skin, and I will not cover it up just because it is not the rosy baby soft stuff I was born with.  Shiny lotion is my super power,  and I make sure that it smells wonderful too. If in a decade from now my future grandkids want to pet my soft and stretchy skin while awaiting some magical treat baking nearby I will let them and smile, giving a wink to Grandma Mary.