Recognize Yourself Again.
I caught sight of my own reflection in the window of a consignment shop on Main Street in Hudson, Ohio last September, and I stood there on the sidewalk for almost four minutes trying to figure out who I was looking at. That is not a metaphor. I want you to understand that I literally did not recognize her. I was holding a small paper bag from the bakery next door. I had stopped in front of the consignment shop because there was a green dress on a mannequin in the window that I'd been thinking about for two weeks. I leaned forward to look at the price tag pinned to the sleeve. And the woman in the reflection leaned forward with me. Her face was heavy. Not heavy in the way you'd describe to a doctor. Heavy in the way a couch looks heavy when nobody has sat in it for a while and the cushions have settled. Her jawline was gone — not in a dramatic way, just softened down into her neck so that the line where her chin used to end was somewhere I could no longer locate. Her eyes looked smaller than I remembered my eyes looking. Her cheeks were full in a way that did not match anything I felt from the inside. The bakery bag in her hand was the same bakery bag in my hand. So I knew it was me. I just didn't know when it had become me. My name is Rosemary. I'm 54 years old. I live in Hudson with my husband Ed who teaches eighth grade English at the middle school. We have one daughter, Christine, who is 27 and lives in Columbus and works for an insurance company. I work three days a week at a small accounting office downtown doing books for local businesses — the dentist on Aurora Street, the family restaurant on the square, the contractor who does the snow plowing for half the neighborhood. I've worked there for 19 years. I stood in front of that window for almost four minutes. Then I walked back to my car. I did not buy the green dress. I sat in the driver's seat in the lot behind the bakery and I cried in a way I had not cried since my father's funer
