4 inches of snow, pale skin, and a photo op.

I was gonna post something about the first snow of the season..."blah blah blah...it snowed last night...4 inches or something like that, and it's nice. some kids in mountain towns got a 2-hour delay...blah blah." but...this trumps snow:

Among a dozen or so parts of my body, I seem to have always been extra extra self-conscious about my pale skin. I wouldn't dare let a guy, or a Peeping-Tom, see me flat out naked unless I had a tan or at least a slathering of some Sun Laboratories (tip: I swear by this stuff post-Winter. It's the only self-tanner w/o that oompla-loompa tint). But lately, like so many other realizations that come with age, I'm starting to become okay with my paleness. Sometimes, with a bit of self-examination and flattering lighting, I'd even call it pretty. I'm getting there. Though, no matter how grown I get, it's still an uphill battle to unhear the "white girl!" taunts from my adolescence. If you went to my high school, you got tormented waaaaaay more for being unfortunately light than for being strikingly dark. (later I'd find that this light-skinned/dark-skinned battle, whether post-high school, post-college, or post-humous, never ends.)

Kids who couldn't even spell it used to call me "translucent!" Remember that movie "Powder?" Yep, that was one of my nicknames back then. I used to pray to the melanin gods to make me just fall somewhere in the middle. I once even oiled myself with vegetable oil and laid out in the sun...to my chagrin, I fried to red, instead of brown.

Nowadays, I can laugh at SOME OF my memories of taunting and of dreams of being browner. And I've been a little more accepting of the "white girl" that I am, often telling myself--and others, "I'm NOT pale. I'm FAIR!" **think Lizzie Bennet**
Photo by S. Smith