Spiders and dimples

I have never looked carefully at my neck, but my younger son Sacha, a few months earlier, had commented on how spidery the skin there had become. I have never worried about a double chin because my face is small and my skin fairly taut, but lately, Nando had been calling attention to the extra roll of flesh beneath my once-firm chin line.

I hadn’t fretted unduly about the two lines running down from my nose to the outside of my mouth because they would disappear into hyper-attenuated "dimples" when I smiled . . . and I did try to smile frequently. As for the laugh lines around my eyes -- those had appeared when I was in my 20s. They were old friends by now.