My legs are smelling of shaving cream. Not the pleasant girl kind that smells of flowers, but the manly smell of Barbosol. I came home tonight, stripped off my pants and watched my dry skin flake off so very disgustingly from my legs. I tried thinking back to the last time I shaved my legs. It had to be months. When was that wedding that I attended? That was the last time they had seen a razor.

My skin tends to look like fish scales in the winter. No amount of lotion seems to hold in the moisture. I don’t use soap on my skin, but the hot water from the shower has to add to the dryness. I don’t have that issue in the summer months when I wear shorts.

I’ve gotten to that age when my leg and underarm hairs are becoming, shall we say, less dense. I thought my underarm hair had stopped growing and I slowed down shaving. Imagine my surprise when for some reason I touched my arm pit and felt these long stragglely hairs. (Mortified!) It hadn’t stopped growing! I simply couldn’t see it anymore without my glasses and since I don’t wear them in the shower….. I don’t rely on sight anymore. I simply shave every few days as if I’m a spring chicken again.

Now I know most of these changes are caused because I’m post menopausal. Isn’t it funny that menopause has the word ‘pause’ in it. It should have the word ‘hot’ as a base word. Flashes of inner heat! My life isn’t ‘paused’ but changed.

Before Eve’s decision and the change that occurred within her and Adam’s heart, did God intend for women to have hormonal changes? Would we have hot flashes, dry skin, thin hair, and sagging? It is a question I don’t really care if I ever know the answer. Life is life. With aging, I appreciate the beauty of wisdom.

I love the first night after shaving when the sheets feel so soft on my bare legs. It’s not as if I hate shaving and it really doesn’t take a long time to complete the task. I only have a shower in my bathroom, which means moving shaving cream and razor to the other bathroom to sit on the side of the tub and dehair my legs. There’s no way I can stand and shave in my tiny, cubicle shower without enough light or space. Never mind that I can’t see a thing without my glasses!

My first razor was an electric Remington bought from a garage sale for a quarter. I shaved with that razor well into my marriage. I didn’t begin shaving until high school. My leg hair has always been baby fine and very thin. It pretty much feels like the hair on my arms. It grows at an amazing slow rate compared to some of my friends’ leg hair, so weeks between shaving is normal for me. However, accumulating months of hair does require some effort to remove it.

This post ranks as one of the silliest I’ve ever written.

My mind has been on the sadness of the loss of children. One young adult who chose to end his own and one young four year old, clinging on with extensive brain damage. I don’t know the boys, and I have no connection to the families, but I feel for the parents lives and the grief they will bare. Families forever changed.

So, tonight I reached for the mundane of normal. I felt my legs on the sheets and the smell coming from them. I appreciate the beauty of my mundane life and shaving my legs, and I pray for those parents.