Wilted Flowers
There is an irony between the 80-year-old woman standing in the Post office lobby with pigtails, brightly colored ribbons, and a garland of flowers in her hair with the article about women servers wearing pigtails delivering male customers infantilized sexual fantasies. She is beautiful in her orange paisley dress and open-toe sandals, hunched and bent, the tell-tale signs of osteoporosis in her posture. She is pretty, beautiful in the way wilted flowers can be.
Being fetishized at 80 is unlikely, but it stopped me, and that should count for something, and I saw her, really saw her. I paused in my routine to look at her face and hair, studying the print and color of her dress and the worn care of her stylish brown sandals. At an age when someone isn't seen or noticed, perhaps pigtails aren't a throwback to Baby Spice but instead a way of not being marginalized.
And who doesn't want to look pretty? There are so many trappings to that word. During the pandemic, when I wore the same thing every damned day, I bought false eyelashes for the first time and wore them around the house. Just at home. Just for me. And maybe Chuck, who still tells me I'm pretty if I wear dirty clothes from my walk. Pretty isn't a look. It is a feeling.
On one of my last visits to see Mom, she couldn't leave her medical bed, but when I arrived, she had painted her face with her weakened arthritic hand. She wanted to look pretty, but more importantly, she wanted to feel that way.
