dappled thing; Splashed across noses, sprinkled along arms, freckles are girlish, charming-and not always appreciated.(narrative)(Column)

Byline: Susan Orlean

Not long ago, I came across a poem called "Pied Beauty"-Gerard Manley Hopkins's exultant celebration of all things spotted, flecked, mottled, and dotted. How different my life would have been if I'd come across the poem in my teens! I was in full freckle then, and suffering it not gladly. I hated being, as Hopkins would have described me, a dappled thing. I would have given the world, back then, to be monochromatic, bland, beige. I ducked every comparison to all the freckled figures in popular culture: I shuddered at every image of Raggedy Ann and Pippi Longstocking, every mention of Lucille Ball, every reference to the Life cereal ads featuring Mikey, the quintessential red-haired, snub-nosed, bright-eyed, freckle-faced kid.

There was a time in my life when I

wasn't freckled. As a baby I was as creamy and white as a bar of soap. And then, like all suburban girls in the sixties, I spent every waking moment in the open glare of the sun. At seven, I had a sprinkle across my nose; by the time I was ten I was abloom-forehead, cheeks, arms, and shoulders. It was cute, I guess, but it was different, and different is the bane of a preteen's existence. What's more, it served as a sort of open invitation. I rarely went out in public without some well-intentioned but unthinking soul-usually someone well into middle age, beyond the reach of remembering the miseries of adolescence-waylaying me to remark on my abundance of freckles and to ask if I'd ever counted them (honestly, who would?). I didn't like my freckles, and to spite me they divided and multiplied. My sister and I read everything we could about freckle cream and freckle cures, about homeopathic lemon-juice bleaches and skin-brightening salves, but deep in our redheaded hearts I think we knew that no matter what we tried, we were going to have freckles for life.

There was a sea change in beauty sometime during my girlhood. Lucky for me, it was a change that shaded things in my favor. Suddenly, not every model was perfect and unmarked; not every magazine cover featured impassive alabaster figurines. Twiggy had freckles. Darling ones, and not too many, but she definitely had a scattering; I spent hours gazing at her pictures not to admire her saucer eyes, her pillow cheeks, or her stork's limbs, but to marvel over her freckles, which seemed-amazingly enough, in my opinion-not to make her less beautiful. Cheryl Tiegs, flushed with sun, was lightly freckled, too, and in her case it seemed a diagnostic feature of her version of beauty: she appeared to be the sort of gorgeous girl who spent lots of time playing beach volleyball, not hiding inside powdering her face into a deathly pale. She was the human correlative to Gerard Manley Hopkins's glorious stippled trout and finches' wings, a piece of nature, with all of nature's variations, rather than a stone image that would never change. These fabulous, freckled idols of mine started making the idea of happily coexisting with my freckles more palatable. They endured their freckles-in fact, they reveled in their freckles-so why shouldn't I?

Maybe the end of adolescence is marked by the moment you start taking a measure of who you really are, not what you wistfully wish to be. For me it was freckle-related. Without really noticing, I had stopped cursing my speckled, stippled, dappled self. I even started to like my freckles: they seemed youthful and frisky, like something you'd pick up at summer camp. I realized how much my attitude had changed the first time I had my makeup done professionally. ...