Excess Skin

Sizes Too Large Now

As I age — my skin outgrows me by a size or two

I must be shrinking. My skin is not shrinking along.

This never happens to eleven-year-olds. Right size skin all the way that very flexibly expands and contracts as the muscle and/or fat ground beneath expands and contracts. Not a worry. Not even a thought.

Life goes on. Homework to do.

Then work to do.

Then, about ten years ago now, I caught the inside of my lower arm while doing some stretching exercises in my Coeur d’Alene cabin, and at that angle, in that light, casting those shadows I see someone else’s skin. Someone much-older-than-I-am’s skin. Someone older’s wrinkled skin. Someone else’s a little too baggy skin.

This was strange enough to make me hold up, lift my arm, scrutinize the skin, twisting it a bit, stretching it a bit, folding it together a bit (it folded quite neatly, like an accordion come to think of it): yes, definitely, this skin is too large for my arm. Well, I’ll be damned.

And no such thing at Costco or Walmart as a skin-shrinker, is there? No special skin-shrinking creams that’ll do the trick, not to the extent needed. Well, I guess some say they do, but they don’t. And no magic spells online.

Slowly coming to terms with this surprising (though it shouldn’t be, not really, had I thought about it) side effect of aging. Skin will expand to give the ground beneath plenty of room, but it will no longer contract should you lose an inch or portion of one — the old, slightly too large skin, remain the old, slightly too large skin. And filling it out again might not be a healthy option.

Scroll forward another ten years and today I have come to accept (even if not completely come to terms with, nor happily) this consequence of aging.

But I now wonder this: at what point in life, at what age, does the skin give up its contracting obligation? I wish I had kept a closer eye on the thing, and then I would now know, perhaps. Have kept and eye since, but remain ignorant. No clues.

No, I am not so vain as to even consider doing something about this, though I realize that it’s in this neighborhood that the plastic surgeon makes his or her killings — excess skin removal.

Some people wear wrinkles well. Tommy Lee Jones comes to mind. Mother Theresa, too — although almost frighteningly well. Me, I’m not a member of that club, not yet anyway; but then I’m not wrinkly enough to tell — though I’m working on it.

Tick, tock.

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© Wolfstuff