Well, I Can See I'm Going to Have to Take Back a Lot of What I've Said

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day when the subject of the state of our bodies came up.
Having known each other since shortly after high school, we had a lot of ground to cover, and much of it was freckled.
My friend confides that the picture of her in a bikini in her early 20s and doing the dishes maintains all the lithe detail you’d ever want in photographic proof of hotness and remains a source of pride and inspiration.
Plus it’s evidence that she has, indeed, done the dishes at least once.
Me, I am pleased to report that my ankles continue to be identifiable as separate from my calves and that I can still fit into the earrings I wore in high school.
And that concludes the uplifting news.
The truth is that it appears that the very things we noticed in older women, as younger women, have reared up to bite us on our unthinking and uncharitable asses.
Me? No, I’ve never been thoughtlessly cruel. Unless you count my teen-aged snickering of a rather mountainous woman on a beach in Florida. My sister and I sat on our smug little beach towels and spoke in nasty asides of balloons stuffed with grapes, of large and quaking puddings. I am confident that the woman in question didn’t hear us, asleep and with headphones on as she was; but decades later, as I contemplate the state of my thighs, I can only be glad that we didn’t mock a bald woman.
What were we thinking? Or was it a matter of not thinking? For surely no one ever got toward the head of the age line and said, “I’d like to develop jowls, please. Ooh, and if I could get the weird tiny veins at the back of my knees that would be lovely as well.”
The summer season, in all its flesh-baring and short-lived ways, is a reminder, isn’t it?
Wear that bikini while you can. Autumn is coming.