This is what I look like in 2010. On a good day. Photo taken after a long afternoon spent traipsing around Canal Park and downtown Duluth on a cold, rainy, blustery Saturday in April.
…Instead of holing up in the nearby DECC, where, at the time this photo was taken, I believe the DFLers were on their second of six — or seventeen, or thirty, I don’t remember exactly how many — ballots, trying to decide on a candidate to endorse for this year’s gubernatorial race. I don’t know about the DFL, but I had a perfectly lovely time. Walked out on the point; watched the lift bridge go up & down; went thru the much-loved Lake Superior Marine Museum for the eleventy-billionth time; had a gorgeous steak and a Cuba Libre at Grandma’s.
So now you’ll know how to recognize your kindly old (57 years old to be exact) Auntie Tild if we should happen to run into each other somewhere IRL. Needless to say, if you require the proprietors of the blogs you frequent to be: 1) youthful, 2) wrinklefree, or 3) thin, then you’d better just move along. Trust me, I’ll get over it.
~
Looking good to me!
Uh huh. Then again, what else are you gonna say to your sister?
…If you want to live, I mean?
If you were in the Caribou Coffee with me here in Red Wing, You would be embarrassed by all the stares I am getting because I just did a Wolf Whistle.
Oh Rook! What a peach you are. A courtly, too-generous, but sweet sweet peach.
Tild -
They say that you end up with the face you deserve – I see kindness, laughter, and a naughty twinkle. So, hell ya, baby, live it up!
Regards,
Tengrain
Thanks, Tengrain! Gosh. /blushing mightily
A peach, huh. Don’t you squeeze a peach?
Yep!
…Which reminds me, I still owe you a personalized crate label for your blog. I should definitely start yours with a peach crate label!
I like the face! I like it because it reminds me of my own face, which is the face of a woman who knows she looks like her grandmother and is comfortable with that fact, as her grandmother was a good person.
Yeah, I put in the “no apologies” part because initially when I was about to post that photo I felt that I should say something self-deprecating and slightly rueful, to the effect of “Sorry I’m not younger/thinner/more attractive”. But then I asked myself: Why should I apologize for looking like I look? Why should I apologize for looking like a 57 year old woman, which is what I am? The truth is that I’m quite comfortable with who I am now and how I look now, even sans-makeup and sans-photo retouching. Even with the wrinkles and the extra pounds.
Also true for me is that I wouldn’t go back even a single year. The older I get, the more confident I seem to get about expressing myself, and that feels flat-out great. The increased confidence seems to derive from having lived through a lot of years now, and the ups and downs that came with them, and finally coming to the realization that the world is not going to collapse (or even notice much) if I should happen to just blurt out exactly what I think about something. And then finally I thought: Jesus christ on a pogostick, if I’m not grown up enough now to speak my mind, when am I going to be?
I wouldn’t trade that confidence, or those years, for all the botox, plastic surgery and liposuction in the universe.