When she was in her early twenties, my sister Mary fell asleep on Myrtle Beach (South Carolina). I am quite fair-skinned; Mary (and Laura too) might be even paler than I am. Anyway, when Mary woke up, she was badly burned (notice I don’t say “sunburned” because somehow that phrase seems to take the sting out of it, making it seem less severe). Mary suffered for days. Her skin blazed and eventually peeled in great swaths, her face and ankles puffed up, and one of the few things that gave her even mild relief was bathing in cold tea.

I’ve been sunburned too, as the result of my own foolish behavior. In the seventies when we were growing up, many women (and girls) of my demographic felt it was very important to “get a tan.” One neighbor lady ran a horse farm, working all day in the Virginia summer sun wearing only a swimsuit. Her skin, I must say, resembled the saddles that some of her young charges spent hours maintaining with oil and soft brushes, except that her skin was less well cared for. Women who lacked her lifestyle opportunity to tan would spend hours and hours in tanning booths. Melanoma? What’s that?

My attempt to get a tan via shortcut occurred during my senior year, on our class trip to Daytona Beach. The first day, I carefully applied suntan lotion, which was supposed to “keep out the burning rays and let through the tanning rays,” whatever the hell that means. At the end of the first day, I examined my arms for signs of rich mahogany shades and found only skim milk. So, the next day, I went commando. No lotion for me; I would get some color on my skin or know the reason why! (In those days, if you went to the beach and came back with your skin still pale people would laugh at you and accuse you of lying about where you had been.)

Anyway, I spent the entire day out in the Florida sun in my swimsuit, with nothing at all between most of me and the onslaught of ultraviolet. I kept checking my skin for signs of emerging beauty, but saw nothing at all until that evening, when all my exposed skin suddenly turned fire-brick red. I spent the entire night wrestling with a sheet. When I put the sheet over myself, my skin seemed to catch fire, and when I threw the sheet off, I would immediately start shaking with a chill.

I learned my lesson. Starting then and continuing up to now, I protect my skin from the sun. I use sunscreen and straw hats and even long sleeves. Gradually, the people around me have morphed into people smart enough not to sneer at a person who chooses not to damage her largest organ, and I must say, in all modesty, that I can really rock a broad-brimmed straw hat.

There was that slightly awkward moment, though, when sister Laura and I went swimming in Goose Lake a few weeks after arriving in Anchorage, Alaska (summer of 1979). We waded out into the water, white legs collectively gleaming like the belly of a halibut, when the lifeguard got on his bull horn and shouted at us, “Hey! You can’t go in the water with long pants!” We turned and stared at him in puzzlement, giving him a chance to reinterpret our slightly freakish appearance.

“Oh,” he said, “Never mind.”