Nostalgia

 As nostalgia involuntarily meanders through my ethos, I question how it seems that one day I was playing games like hop-scotch, hide and seek, jacks, and kick-the-can than several seconds later my doctor is  making statements like at your age you should expected certain changes in your skin.

Does expecting changes in my skin mean that I should expect teenage white heads, occasional pimples and should I go out and buy some Clearasil?   

I can now certainly see the benefit of my subscription to the, (Massachusetts General Hospital Newsletter), as it recommended the use of salicylic acid for maturing skin.  My physician's comment was void of any recommendations or suggestions.  If a  person that is a few decades passed forty does that make their vanity concerns less valid?  As one, if I am being honest, who is actually three decades past forty, I certainly don't want to look in the mirror in the morning and see a protruding white blotch in the middle of my forehead.  

In witnessing a whitehead, I may not have experienced the teenage devastation and drama, but I must confess that I find the conspicuous white blotch unattractive and physically disturbing. Perhaps I misunderstood the doctor, my thirty year junior, and maybe she was not being nonchalant, dismissive or indifferent.  It might have just been that she could not equate with why the blotch mattered to me.  My math was a little off a few sentences ago, the correction is that she is (my forty junior).

The games we children played in our early years were actually building our physical agility and strength.  The  challenges of playing Double-Dutch, the leg muscle building of bike riding, and why do children prefer running to walking?

As a child , I was fascinated by ladybugs.  Those tiny creatures with the red body speckled with black spots.  I often used an index card so that the bug would crawl on it then I would allow the lady to walk onto the back of my hand, all the while being completely in awe.  I never understood the rhyme,  "    Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children all burn." I learned today that the rhyme is,  "an illusion to the practice of farmers burning their fields after the harvest."

Ladybug, ladybug is also considered a chant to send on its way. The ladybug beetle is helpful to farmers by reducing the number of harmful larvae and insects on crops. In certain parts of the English-speaking world, farmers chanted right before and they burned their fields after harvest.  " Ladybug ladybug, fly away home/ Your house is on fire, your children alone (or your children are gone).  Some people still recite the verse when a ladybug lands on them and before gently flicking the insect off of them, because swatting a ladybug is considered very bad luck.  ( Information regarding the history of the Ladybug rhyme was collected from, ("The Webmaster's page").