Skin

I've been spending the past week with my sisters, who I only get to see about once or twice a year. They choose to live in a traffic-heavy and humid-infected area and my poor, little Midwestern sensibilities just can't handle such drama and weather-induced plumpiness. And I do swear, because of the 120% humidity, I've swelled up to about two times my original size.

(And that has nothing at all to do with the cheese steak, refried beans, and pineapple upside cake I've been scarfing. Absolutely nothing. At all.)

But all that sitting and waiting in unreasonable and uncivilized heat does result in a certain scarcity of clothing--and revealing of skin.

Yesterday, I followed my scantily clad sister into our mom's house--unlike the rest of this town who insists on a 40 degree drop from outside to inside, my mother believes in temperate equilibrium. (Her house is damn hot.) My sister held open the door for me, her freckled arm extended behind in unconscious welcome, something I've discovered that Southerners do much better than Midwesterners, who are more likely than not to let the door slam your forehead. And I say that with the authority of experience, folks.

It's a gesture I've been on the back end for, it must be, thousands of times. You know, in the South. And the one simple movement of etiquette that I have missed the most since I moved away. Sure, it's an afterthought, it's not like someone actually standing back to let you through a door before them, but it's an awareness, an acknowledgment, I suppose, that you are there, that you are part of someone else's space, that you are for a brief moment a part of their life. And it matters. However briefly, however cursory. It's continuity, a line between you and someone else marked by their extended arm.

So there I am, reaching out to take the door that my sister is passing through, that she holds open for me to catch, and I see it. A constellation of freckles and moles on slightly browned skin. The skin of another arm that I would hold in my hand and memorize, trace, trying to capture the history of each imperfection, the mottling of each sun-kissed follicle, knowing that soon I would never be able to connect those dots. The skin of my father.

I remember, right after my father died, looking at myself in the mirror, trying to find his face, trying to find something in me that would remind me of him--a lilt of my right eyebrow, the brown of my eyes. I have his temperament, his impatient passion, but you can't find that in the mirror. And memories are just so stubbornly visual. When it comes down to it, I am my mother's child. I've got her family's red, straight hair, their fair skin.

But in that one moment, in that line between my sister's arm stretching back and mine stretching forward I saw, in both, the skin of my father. The freckles (one on white, one on wheat), the moles--and the history, if not always of place, that connects me to her.