Arrrgh!!!

I've been thinking about skin today. Actually, I've been envisioning skin. Little snapshots have been interrupting my train of thought, and what they all have in common is skin. Texture, temperature, taste, color......it's really very complex.

Don't you find it amazing that you once were a baby with skin that begged to be nuzzled? You had skin crisscrossed with miniature veins, little rivers of blue carrying your lifeblood. Your skin was plump and moist, with a sheen that was luminous. When you had been bathed, every woman in the room wanted to hold you and sniff that clean baby smell. That beautiful skin begged to be touched.

As a young adult, your skin begs to be touched in a different way. Women watch construction workers with a six-pack of muscles and fantacize away their lunch hours. Rivulets of sweat trickle down chests and backs and draw attention to muscle and sinew covered with skin kissed by the sun. Men dream of tasting, and touching and inhaling the scent of a woman, and an experienced lover knows the value of skin as an erotic feast.

And then our skin begins to change. We loose elasticity, and the plumpness of youth. We gain wrinkles, and blemishes. Our hands look like road maps from too many days in the sun and not enough moisturizer. We show the wear of our years.

But.....our skin is still receptive to touch. No matter what age we are, we never out grow the need to be touched. The warmth of another hand holding ours is more important than all the material things in the world. Who would have thought that skin touching skin is one of the great wonders of our world?