Around Her Neck Each Day

Around her neck each day, Christina wore one of several colored scarves, which she carefully kept from dangling into her pot of potatoes. I think perhaps that those scarves were meant to hide something, like the horrible secret of the wife in legends who wore a mysterious ribbon about her neck until, swayed by her husband's questions, she took it lose and her head fell off. But to me, the scarves that Christina put on every morning were objects of revelation. They were icons, eschatalogical signs, if you will, pointing me to something beyond the immediate circumstances of pocked skin and cold weather.

We know that there is nothing very beautiful about a seventy year-old neck. A bottle of wine that has existed for seventy years has undergone beautiful changes, and so it costs $300. Even seventy year-old eye sockets on a man or a woman can be striking as a facial testament to a life, displaying laughter and weeping, good times and hard times. But a neck? A neck is, without expression or obvious change from day to day. Then one morning, you wake and your grandmother or your mother, or you yourself, are seventy, and you and your neck have weathered seventy years. You put on a scarf.