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Beef Fat for Beauty
Two poems about fat and some thoughts about my face
For years, our family has passed around this little green tube of creamy yellow paste in the wintertime.
It’s bigger than a chapstick, but still small enough to fit in a pocket. It has a mild vanilla smell and it starts out hard, but it softens and spreads the second it hits your skin. There’s a label on the side, but because the letters faded away long ago, we’ve never known what it’s called.
So we all just call it ‘face schmoo’.
Face schmoo is used on real winter days when the whipping wind is cold enough to make your eyes tear up like you’re reading the end of a Jodi Picoult novel. You can rub it on the tip of your nose, on your cheeks, or your forehead. It’s a little bit greasy, but it traps the heat and leaves your skin feeling gloriously supple.
The schmoo tube is of unknown origins. It might have been a Christmas gift or a leftover item from a long-ago roommate. Maybe it was left in a jacket pocket by an old girlfriend or maybe it came free with an expensive purchase from an outing goods store.
We don’t know and we never cared. We just used it, year after year, on the coldest of cold days. When my kids were babies, we rubbed it all over their faces…
