When a Southern Woman Rambles... by L. Avery Brown (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

Take for instance the woman who frequents the community pool my family and I used to visit. I dubbed her ‘Creepy Mole Lady’ and the first time I saw her was etched deep in my memory.  It was several years ago and my daughter and I were enjoying an afternoon at the pool. I remember watching Creepy Mole Lady arrive with her fair-skinned daughter and her two practically translucent white skinned granddaughters even though she, herself, was darker than a toasted wheat bagel.

Creepy Mole Lady is (though given the time that’s passed it’s very likely that she is now a ‘was’) a tall – some might even call her regally tall – thin woman who I imagine was considered quite attractive in her youth.  Of course, it was a different time back then.  She probably basked in the sun without a care in the world as she smoked her cigarettes and sipped sickeningly saccharine-sweetened Tab soda.  Whenever I saw her, she always had on a vibrant one-piece bathing suit (imagine various colors of an Annette Funicello Beach Blanket Bingo style of suit).  And then there’s her extremely white hair, which can best be described as looking like puffy spun sugar, which was always adorned with a brightly colored bow that seemed to float on the fluffy bed of stark white.

But the thing that stood out the most to me wasn’t her hair or her cute swimsuits or her long, lanky stature.  Nor was it the disheartening fact that she held onto her cigarette lighter like it was a Holy relic.  No.  It was something altogether...creepy.  

The ‘it’ of which I speak were huge...and I do mean HUGE, thick, crusty looking moles on her back.  I swear these moles were such gnarly looking things, you would think someone had playfully super glued Sun-Maid Raisins to her back.

I remember watching her as she spread her extra-long towel onto her lounge chair and proceeded to pull out her various potions and lotions from her Mary Poppins bottomless pit of a pool bag.  I immediately recognized one item as a can of spray-on Coppertone Sport and another as Johnson’s Baby Oil.  Then I watched as she employed what I like to refer to as the ‘the whiff of a sniff is enough’ method of sunscreen application wherein the process ceases once the scent of the product reaches one’s nostrils.   

Of course, you’re probably thinking ‘well, at least she used the stuff’ which is exactly what I thought, until... 

I watched as she tossed the actual sunscreen back in the pit-bag and flipped the lid on her large sized bottle of baby oil and proceeded to squeeze enough of the stuff into her palm that I heard the bottle ‘crunch’ under her crushing squeeze.  Then I watched as she painstakingly applied what was probably enough of the softly scented mineral oil onto her skin to qualify for a federal oil spill disaster grant. And then, as if that wasn’t enough, when she was done coating every open space of her elder-aged skin, going so far as to smooth it between her toes, she took a water filled squeeze bottle that once held Windex and proceeded to spray her entire body.  (Although, in retrospect, I suppose I should be at least a little bit happy she believes in the value of recycling plastics.)

When she was done, she glistened.  Seriously.  I kid you not when I say...Creepy Mole Lady actually shimmered...honest to gosh shone like a gleaming solar beacon so brightly I could see thousands of tiny rainbows dancing across her skin thanks to the multitude of prisms created by the water and oil mixture while she lay there soaking up the rays.

To be honest, I almost couldn’t believe it when she stood up and didn’t slip on the concrete like a flounder tossed to an amateur fishmonger as the whistle blew for the adult swim to start.  And the fact that she was able to hold steady to the handrail as she stepped into the pool made me wonder if she had suction cups on her soles and palms sort of like an octopus has on its tentacles.  Then, after she’d thoroughly cooled her skin in preparation for round 2, she dried off – though dried off isn’t really what it was as the water rolled off her.  No, it was more like she used a terrycloth boom to soak up the layer of oil from her hands so she could snatch up her trusty lighter and pack of smokes.  After which Creepy Mole Lady stepped outside the pool gates with her daughter to enjoy a smoke while her granddaughters did a quick sunscreen spritz (onto wet skin) before immediately jumping back into the water.

But the thing that freaked me the most and made me want to grab my daughter and dunk her into a vat of SPF Lead to keep her from any UVA/UVB harm happened when Creepy Mole Lady returned to her lounge chair. She completed the ceremonial spreading of the oil so that she could lie down on her stomach and turned her back to me before she lay down.  That’s when I really saw them...all three of them...in all their creepy, blackened, misshapen, larger than a pencil eraser glory.  My Lord!  I declare if they had mouths, I bet they could’ve broken out into a wicked three-part harmony as they extoled the virtues of Ra, the Ancient Egyptian Sun God!

And even though it was nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit, I shivered and half way expected the crusty things, one of which had a long silver hair protruding out the center of the thing, to look over at me, give me a little wink and smile or something.  Just remembering the image of Creepy Mole Lady, her offspring, and the crusty-cancerous (if they weren’t, I’d be stunned) trio made me yearn to swim in a pool of creamy SPF protection.

Oh yes, I can honestly say that one day at the pool was disturbing enough to make me cherish my sunscreen for a lifetime.  In the end, if you take anything away from this...please let it be that you’ve only got one birthday suit...treat it well or you might never make it to your next birthday.  

The moral of this Tragic Tale of Beauty:

Before you go out to enjoy the beauty of agloriously sunny day,
ask yourself is that sexyTropicana tan really worth it?

If the eyes are the windows to the soul, 

then the eyebrows are the decorative valances 
that hang over them.

Unfortunately, many eyebrows are
in dire need of a designer makeover...

***

I thought of that phrase while I was watching a reality television show and saw a man with a massive Leonid Brezhnev-esque unibrow.  And I remember how I stared at the broad clump of dark hair fearing it was going to break out into song or something.  I then told myself that one day I’d write about it because if ever there was a tragic tale of beauty simply asking to be written – it was about a unibrow.  All I had to do was be patient and wait for ‘that moment’ when the it that I needed create a rib-tickling tale would make itself known.

So, I waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.  Until several months had passed and quite frankly…life got in the way and I forgot all about my reality TV inspired proclamation.  Though forgot isn’t the correct term.  It’s more like, I tucked it away in the Rolodex of ideas in my brain where it could be accessed later. 

Then, one day, during an early morning trip, on a gorgeous North Carolina summer’s day to the grocery store, I had my moment.  And it was the moment when I saw them.  

● The them  my subconscious had apparently been waiting on for months.   

●The them who would make all those moments when my nifty opening phrase would pop into my head worthwhile.  Yes!  I saw them:  a woman around forty and her mother, as I made my way through the produce section.  Though actually I should say I heard them first…

You see, I was contemplating buying a head of lettuce when I heard the daughter, who had a deep feminine voice that sounded like she’d swallowed sandpaper call out, “Maw-ma, what kind you want?  You want the hot-house ‘maters or you want the vine ripe ‘maters?” 

I glanced over my shoulder expecting to see a big burly lumber Jill of a woman but to my surprise she was about my height (5’2”).  Though technically she was closer to 5’7” because her hair, well actually her bangs, were about five inches tall with super teased afro-esque curls that were no doubt created thanks to a chemical solution and LOTS of tiny curling rods whereas the rest of her hair, from the crown down, was straight as a stick.  And at that moment, I had a flashback to my high school days in the 1980s when big, poofy hair was all the rage and the height of one’s bangs reflected their overall coolness factor.  (Sadly, I was utterly uncool because I had, and still have, boring straight Marcia Brady hair).  

But it wasn’t her super-teased Dynasty inspired tresses that got my attention.  However, I’ll be honest and say I did make a point to store the thought away for later use.  Nope.

And it wasn’t her oversized, totally out of season, black Halloween sweatshirt with sparkly orange sequined pumpkins on it either nor was it her faded blue ‘mom’ jeans.  It was...that’s right...her eyebrows.

The poor things had been plucked to near oblivion; the right one thinner than the left.  And they were somewhat cockeyed.  In a nutshell, her eyebrows wore the mark of a right handed woman who’d probably been self-plucking for decades as self-pluckers usually aren’t dexterous enough to evenly tend their brow hairs so they often over groom whichever side is the same as their dominant hand. 

Now perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed her eyebrows (too much) if she’d not also been wearing heavy dark blue eyeliner and thick mascara that made her eyes appear rather tiny and eye shadow in a shimmering silver with a hint of blue shade that made the space between her eyelids and eyebrows look like a Caribbean strait in the moonlight.  But as it was, I did notice and as soon as the image hit the back of my eyeballs, the phrase which had been dogging me for months starting barking; telling me to remember every nuance of the moment.  Yes, in the split second when I glanced over my shoulder…all the pieces started falling in place.

But lo, there is more.  For as you will recall I said it was not simply a her that I saw.  No, it was a them.  That’s right...the her’s mother, the aforementioned Maw-ma, who also had eyebrows that spoke volumes.   

How so?  Well, aside from the fact that Maw-ma was donning a pair of lavender sweat pants and a summery T-shirt, bedazzled with all sorts of flashy doo-dads and metallic puffy paint tucked ever so neatly into the elastic band of her pants, she also had eyebrows the likes of which boggled my mind.  And now I suppose I ought to describe them though somehow I fear my words alone will not be