Beauty

The air is amazing yesterday and today - warm, but not sticky, and redolent with sweetness. Flowers are in full bloom, and two of my favourites are filling the air to bursting with their scent. The air is clear, the light gold-toned, and the linden trees and jasmine bushes are pushing their perfume up my nose, filling my senses with wafts of their heady, rich deliciousness until I feel fair swoony. Can it stay just like this all year? It's simply gorgeous, and I am revelling.

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Pumpkinpie danced away down the hall to her room, having found her favourite pajamas in the clean laundry and donned them in mine. They are striped, with a tiara on the shirt, and the statement, "Canadian Beauty."

I followed her, preparing for our nightly rituals. "Okay, little Canadian Beauty, into bed with you," I instructed her.

"These are my favourite pajamas," she informed me, "because I am Canadian, but am I a beauty?"

She asked it without guile, without doubt or expectation, as only a child could - but what a loaded question!

I kept it simple, "You are beautiful to me, alright, my girl," I said, planting a kiss on her forehead as I settled in beside her for her tucking-in.

It's strange, wanting her at once to know and have the confidence of knowing her own beauty, and at the same time, wanting her free of the knowledge, free of the boastfulness or using of it that can result from that. The fact is that her delicate features, bright, wide eyes, a pretty colouring make her impossibly lovely, but I find the expressing of that to her a touchy balance.

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Last week, one day's work called for practical, even manly clothes, the kind of thing that takes me miles from my girly side and into hardcore comfort and ruggedness. I find that slippery territory, for I am a girl who likes my comfort, and it's easy for me to slide into slobbish, grungey, comfiness, but as much as there is ease in that, I find it also divorces me from the side of myself that enjoys dressing for anything but that.

The next day, then, I went for a snugger dress than any in my closet, paired with a great pair of patent peep-toe pumps to balance it out. Comments all around and some of them flirty rounded out the return to feeling like a proper girl.

I seem to exist on the edge of sliding away entirely from sexy all the time anyhow between the demands on my energy and attention, my total lack of girly skills like hair and makeup, and my resistance to suffering to look good, so it's good to bring myself back in touch with it every now and then!
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