Dear Varicose Veins,

I love you. It's true that I feared you my entire childhood as I watched my grandmother and my mother and my sister despise you and hide you. I carefully watched the powerful women who raised me talk badly about you and wither away from their birthright of beauty, all because of you. You made me mad! I blamed you for the absence of my mother's strong legs being framed by shorts on the beach. I cringed as I saw more and more of you sketched upon my mother's legs as the years passed. And then you pushed up and budded like a crocus in early spring toward the surface of my anticipating skin when I was just 13. That day that I noticed you I was wearing white shorts and a loose blue blouse that moved in the summer breeze at the rodeo in Yelapa. I had just kissed a boy behind the mango tree. As I walked home in a daze of young love, I scratched behind my left knee and saw your first installation on my body. That was the last day I wore shorts.

I have been careful and secretly following your patterns ever since. You like my left leg more than my right. Like a sun you are a circle behind my knee with rays radiating towards all directions, celebrating the beauty of stretching and growing! I took these photographs of myself nude when I was vulnerable and sad not knowing that 2 years later they would teach me to finally love you. I studied the delicate lines on my legs that you have unwaveringly worked on and I finally see your artwork. It's a masterpiece! It's all mine! it's an ancestor of Fibonacci! I finally see and I love your patterns, your gifts to me.

I only regret that I didn't understand your artistry sooner. I wish I knew this when I was little so that I could have told my grandmother before she passed, her legs heavy with shame. I wish I hadn't been frightened of shorts when it was 115 degrees in Tucson and wore slacks instead for not one but two decades. But worry not, I love you now! I am proud and I will honor you with shorts! I will display you with pride and relish my sacred design, my tribal marking, my irreplaceable art.

Thank you for making me even more precious,

Jade

( I took these photos nearly 2 years ago of myself and they are still teaching me things that I didn't realize where weighing me down with unnecessary and useless shame. Unphotoshoped imagery can be so very therapeutic!)