My Appearance

Whenever we first get home the neighbor girl is at our heels. The phone rings right away, the doorbell rings, the sliding glass door has a familiar knock bestowed on it. We are being watched.

Like I have said before, I enjoy my neighbor. She is a very kind and generous woman. She knows everything. She always has advice to give. And she always has a million stories to tell or opinions to relate. She remembers things. She notices things. I think I may have mentioned that she knows everything.

Whenever we run into each other (which is rare lately since she started this job that demands most of her time) she always has some sort of insult for me. I mean, I am not easily insulted at all, it just strikes me as funny that she is lucky that I moved in next door because your average lady would not find the humor in such silly comments! For example:

Last summer I went over to her house to bring something back to her. A plate, maybe. The light outside was just perfect enough for her to notice something on my face. A hair, I think. Without telling me, she picked at my cheek, mid conversation.
"Oh!" she laughed. "It is attached!" she exclaimed, meaning the abnormally long white hair hanging from my cheek. I told her to go ahead and get it if she wanted, I didn't care.

She works for a spa/salon type place where they do microderm abrasions (don't know how to spell that) and inject botox. She has stood there many times since telling me how things work, how she tediously has had to "zap" people's unwanted varicose veins, laser off unwanted hair, etc. Mid conversation she said to me, "You have these lines--" and she pointed to the lines around her mouth, as if to tell me for the first time I need help there.
"Yep," I said, not flinching.
"They could help with that," she dared to continue.
They are from smiling, I thought but said instead, "It's genetic."
She smiled at me like you poor thing, and continued whatever it was she was saying. Botox or something.

She continued at one time to talk about freckles and how she is so thankful that she got hers lasered off. "They would even take those freckles off your face!" she added. She proceeded to point at all the flaws and freckles, unwanted sort of moles on my skin and claimed that all those unwanted things would be taken off if I wanted. "I like my freckles," I said with a smile.
"That's nice," she would say sweetly and continue.

A couple of weeks ago she came to Dear Sir and I while we were doing the gardening. She wanted to borrow the WD-40. I was wearing my ultra cool red sunglasses at the time. I love those things. I gave her the liquid lubricant and put the glasses on my head as she started to talk to me in the shade of the trees. "By the way," she said, "are those sunglasses {the Girl's}?"
"What?" I asked.
"The sunglasses. Are they your daughter's?"
"Nope, they are mine," I said.
"Interesting," she said as she turned to walk off with my WD-40.
I gave a hearty laugh and then mulched the trees.

The slight little insults have become so frequent that Dear Sir tends to say whenever I come in from talking to her, "what'd she say this time?"We both have a laugh about it. Certainly it keeps me less vain!

Oh how about when she saw my hair for the first time when I got it colored my natural color. She said, "Oh, you went darker!" with a fake, kindly smile.
"Yep," I said, "I like it."
"That's nice," she said, meaning, she didn't like it. The look on her face certainly showed it!