Flaws and Freckles

The Gypsy Mama asked people to write for five minutes and not worry if it's just right. Her prompt today: Beauty.

Start.

It’s my fake smile, the one that’s too big and the one in which I squint my eyes almost completely shut. And I’m not sitting up straight and my hair looks so dark and my face so white, and then there's the circles under my eyes, and wait a minute, am I looking old?

I read the prompt and see we are supposed to write about beauty, and that’s easy because I see beauty everywhere I look.

I observe beauty in the way my husband breathes when he sleeps and in the smell of my house and in tiny, mismatched socks that end up everywhere.

I witness beauty in the Blue Ridge Mountains and in the endless Colorado sky and in a favorite friend's laugh when she tells the story about picking up a guy at a funeral while wearing a neck brace (um, true story).

But beauty proves more difficult to see when I look in the mirror. Flaws and freckles demand my attention, and wrinkles and laugh lines stand up and shout.

Yes, it's a little noisy sometimes.

But you know what? I have a secret.

Thirty-six-year-old me knows something twenty-six-year-old me never grasped, the flaws and the freckles don't hinder the beauty, they enhance it. They make me, well, me.

Now, the whole zits and wrinkles thing, that's another story.

Stop.

: :


What about you? How do you handle aging? Is it difficult or easy for you to see the beauty in yourself?