Miss | Naturism

“Miss Naturism,” he said, sliding a thin file across his desk. “The annual pageant in the south of France. Get the spirit of it. Not the… uh, anatomy. The spirit.”

And then there was Elara.

It was the summer of mismatched expectations. I was twenty-three, a junior photo editor for a glossy but unadventurous travel magazine, and my boss had just handed me an assignment I was certain was a prank. miss naturism

Her name was Elara. She was sixty-seven, a retired botanist, and the reigning “Miss Naturism” from the previous year. “Miss Naturism,” he said, sliding a thin file

The contestants ranged in age from twenty-two to eighty-one. There was a former truck driver with a glorious beard and a spiderweb tattoo on his shoulder. A young woman with a mastectomy scar who spoke about reclaiming her body from a year of chemotherapy. A retired postal worker who had taken up naturism at sixty and learned to forgive her own reflection. Not the… uh, anatomy

I kept the sunflower on my desk for years. And every time I looked at it, I remembered that the most undressed I had ever felt was not when I finally took off my clothes by the river on the last morning, but when I realized that no one had noticed I was wearing them in the first place.