Learning to Embrace My Turkey Neck
One day I’ll be identifiable only by my neck skin, flapping freely in the wind
When I look into a mirror, I see my grandmothers staring back at me. Let me be clear: I see their faces. I see their wrinkles. I see their turkey necks.
This has nothing to do with their inner strength. They were both strong, capable women who worked their asses off their entire lives, doing things I can’t even imagine, like canning vegetables in non-air-conditioned kitchens from hell, tending chickens, and taking care of babies without the luxury of disposable diapers. They were miles stronger than me, but their faces paid in the end. And now my face is also paying the price of time, even though my life was far easier and I grew up in the age of sunscreen.
We are a pale, pallid people, my family, totally devoid of melanin. The whitest of the white. My grandmothers both eventually ended up with skin the texture of an uncooked pizza crust stretched too thin: soft, delicate, unable to keep its form, spotted with sun damage. My daughter took one of those ancestry DNA tests, and it explains her blonde hair and alabaster skin: We are of 100% European stock, and I mean the northern and eastern parts of Europe. She is constructed from the blood of the doughiest people on the face of the earth.
