Cobwebs in My Face

One of the side effects of getting older is the sudden appearance of hair in unusual places.

For several years now, I have been keeping company with a suddenly long, thick gray hair that sprouts from my earlobe at irregular times. One day there's nothing, the next there's a hair about 3 inches long. I first discovered this particular hair when I put my hair up in a ponytail - and my ear kept following my hair. As it turns out, that earlobe hair was long enough to put up in my regular ponytail! Once I've discovered its reappearance in my life, I pull the thing out.

I am a natural blonde. So whatever hair I have tends to be invisible. Because of this, in order to feel fully dressed, I need to don mascara and eyebrow pencil before leaving my house. I never plucked my eyebrows. I never saw the need, as my eyebrows were invisible unless I colored them in. I used that hair as a guideline. Then one day, I noticed that coloring inside the lines didn't work anymore. My finished eyebrows were actually taking over my forehead and growing down into my eyes. And there was one long gray hair that sprouted just over my left eye. I tried, but I could never catch it. After 46 years, I finally succumbed to having my brows waxed.

And there's that one chin hair that dangles just enough to make me feel like I've got something crawling on my lower lip. It, too, is invisible, so pulling it out is a major search and destroy mission. I KNOW it's there! I just can't see it.

When I was about 15 years younger, my husband, some friends and I used to go bike riding in the woods in the early weekend mornings. The first person to go was called "Spiderman" because that's the one who would get all the spiderwebs in his face (notice that I said his. Thankfully, this particular honor rarely fell to me.) After the first run through, the helmet and face were laced with delicate strands of incredibly sticky stuff.

This is how my face feels on a fairly regular basis. The cobwebs haven't been etched into my face permanently yet, but the forerunners, those wispy little laces are making themselves known.