A friend writes, as I too believe, that love is in the details. He tells me that he has fallen in love with a woman simply because he loved the shape of the back of her head. Another friend writes that in Japan, and I don't know whether or not this is true, that the back of a woman's neck and the shape of her head in the back are a measure of her beauty and a great one at that. I believe that. To me, the most, or one of the most beautiful places on a woman's body is the hollow at the center of the neck - what we called "the salt cellar" the little dip, or, as I named it for my husband, "M.'s bosphorous", borrowing Rafe Fiennes line from The English Patient because it seemed or seems so apt. Really, it's called the supersternal notch - not the saltcellar, but saltcellar and supersternal notch cannot do justice to this place, just as my love or anyone's love of details - the things that made us fall in love in the first place almost defy reason or definition. How to explain why or how I fell in love because I liked the way his ankles looked in shoes without socks? How I loved the gold color of his skin or the tangle of hair from his oxford that was scented and spiced. Or more simply put, his otherness - that he was or is so completely opposite of all that I am, physically and in many other ways and yet so compatible.
Love is in the details and yes, so is life. The expression, Stop and smell the roses always struck me as trite until I became ill at one point and couldn't get out to smell the roses and then it didn't seem so trite and I just sat there in my wheelchair admiring the flowers blowing in the summer wind, perched in my wheel-chair by the open backdoor with the hot summer air wafting in but unable to move or experience my world, or the world I should say. It may sound trite, but you don't know what you have until it's taken away and if you haven't yet learned this , you will. Trust me you will and if you think not, then you are a fool. Life is bound to take it's toll on all of us at some point - it is the nature of things and it is only then that we can truly appreciate what we do have.
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