In Colchester, Vermont, my first year teaching, I met with success and failure facing slow and fast six grade learners in math, science, and Vermont history. I was qualified to teach high school French. The previous summer, my husband Paul and I had traveled from Calais in northern France, through Paris, around Brittany, south to the Pyrenees, and then east to Nice.
By February, inadequately prepared for this assignment, I collapsed and retired.
Several months later, bored and sufficiently recovered to look for an easy job, I found a small, family-owned shop selling select clothing in Burlington. One of the sales persons was a young woman with a narrow figure somewhere between athletic and willowy. Mine was fuller but still slender. One day the owner passed us and commented on how he liked a woman where he had something to hold onto. His wife, who worked there, was buxom with full hips.
That moment held a life-changing view of men and women.
Recently, I’d been mentally referring to a couple as "the tall man and the short woman." Enjoying their singing and harmonium playing, I finally stopped them to ask their names. The woman laughed and said, "Oh I thought you were going to say 'the fat woman.'"
Later, walking near them, I called out to the woman, going closer. "You have," I began, "a Renoir figure." Her sudden smile, laughter, and the look in her eyes matched my inspiration.
Looking up Renoir, I found "Women Bathing,"* two curvaceous bodies of women at their bath by a stream rippling through a field, demure, their bodies hidden in part by white towels.
My realization is, "We may see without thinking and describe in a way our society sees, or we may see with our minds and hearts open to naming that praises and uplifts."
Women Bathing © 1915, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.