At 46, it would be pretty surprising if I did NOT have scars. So I thought it would probably tell a bit about me if I used this blog idea from Margaret Mason’s “No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog” and listed my life story as told in the marks it’s left on me so far. Illustrated, of course.

1 & 2 - Small keloid scars on the backs of my ears. Showed up just a few years ago after I wore some cheap-ass earrings with too much nickel in them.

3 - Partial thyroidectomy in 1998. Mostly memorable because of the joke I made when I woke up from the anesthesia and saw my loving hubby hovering solicitiously over me and croaked to him, “Could you get me a drink of water? I’m so thirsty my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut. Oh, wait … it has.” (I got a glare and the water.)

4 - Weird skin coloring that arose between my shoulderblades when I was about 15. A dermatologist told me it was a something-nevia. Benign. But it looks icky in backless dresses, because it looks like a fading, purplish salad-plate-sized bruise. [Update: I think he called it a nevus spilus.]

5 - Had one of those moles on my right breast that started to grow, look irregular, change color, etc. (Er, the mole, I mean.) It had to go. (Again, we’re just talking about the mole here.) The removal left a scar that I’m not happy with, a la Frankenboob.

6 - I’ve always called it a freckle because it’s completely flat, but I guess it’s a mole on my left thumb. [Or a smaller nevus spilus, as it's a collection of smaller dots.] One of my uncles liked to tease me when I was a kid, asking me why’d I have some chickenshit on my finger. (Can you tell I have country roots?)

7 - Almost faded away, but there’s a perfectly circular hot grease scar on my right wrist where I was frying chicken carelessly in college at a curb market during one of my zillions of po’ folk jobs.

8 - C-section scar from my younger daughter’s preemie birth in 1997.

9 - Had a wart removed from my right ring finger when I was about 14. I was going to the movies with a boy I’d been ogling from afar, and I was desperate to have the darned thing removed. My doctor wanted me to use something over the counter or come back Monday to have it removed, but when I begged, he burned the wart off in a very surly fashion. I didn’t realize until later on that his glazed eyes were from how drunk he was.

10 - During one of my uber-rare gardening sessions with the demon shrubbery near my front windows in 2006, I got thorns all over me and managed to miss removing the tiny tip of one because it was in an awkward place, high on my right thigh. I figured it would work itself out. More than a year later, I am still scowling at the tiny black dot.

11 - Tiny BLUE dot on my right knee, from where Allison Graham stabbed me in the knee with a pencil during class one day, around the third grade or so. (Hi, Allison!)

12 - Burn scars atop my right toes. In was 1987 and I was in the unhappy last days of my first marriage, living in Waynesboro, Miss. There was a fire at the feed and seed store across the street from the newspaper office where I worked, so I grabbed my Canon and trotted out the door on my hot pink high heels. I was busily snapping shots of the raging fire when I felt my foot slide into some cool, ashy glop. At least it felt cool at first, and then it was searing pain and I was dropping my camera onto the railroad tracks (had to get the camera repaired the next week) and my feet were on fire. Chemical burns that had me ripping off my pantyhose right there on Main Street in front of the mayor, the firemen, and most of downtown, because I was remembering how a woman in the community had recently been badly burned because she was dousing charcoal in a grill with lighter fluid when the flame leapt up the stream of fluids and set her housecoat on fire, melting it into her skin. I wasn’t about to wear pantyhose scars up my legs for the rest of my life. (The mayor teased me about the public striptease the next week.) A fireman rushed over and took expert first aid care of me until the ambulance arrived. Pain like you would not believe on both feet and I lost most of the skin on the soles of both feet, but the scars only show on the tops of the right toes where the chemicals soaked into the tender skin.

13 - Knot on my shin from my college days, when I leapt off my top bunk bed and accidentally landed, full of grace, on the rim of a giant ceramic popcorn bowl that flipped in the air, smacked my shin, and split in two. My shin swelled up comically fast, like Wile E. Coyote’s injuries. There was probably a bone chipped that night, but I was too embarrassed to go to the student health office.

14 - L-shaped scar atop my right big toe, from the Year of Gardening Dangerously, when I left a pair of razor-sharp garden shears open on the ground beside me while I was wallowing around in a flower bed. Of course, I had kicked off my shoes for some reason.

15 - At the old Crystal Springs, Miss., swimming pool one summer when I was about 10 or 11, I stepped on a piece of glass about the size of a quarter that went all the way into my foot. My Aunt Doris was picking me up and the cut was bad enough that she wrapped my foot in a towel and took me to the doctor’s office. No stitches that I remember.

16 - Had a plantar wart removed from my right heel when I was in my early 30s. It was very deep, the doctor said, and it took forever to heal, leaving a small X-shaped scar that you could see in my footprints for years.

17 - Wart removed from right ankle in my 20s; I think it was frozen off. Another perfectly circular scar. (I swear, I was not a particularly warty kid. It’s a virus, I tell you!)

18 - I guess this is a mole too, but it looks like a freckle to me. I’ve got it on the sole of my left foot, under my fourth toe (would that be the “ring” toe?). The weird thing is my Mom has one too in the same spot on her right foot.

And we are NOT going to issue numbers for the stretch marks left by (a) a rapid onset of puberty and (b) my first pregnancy, because I don’t want to edge into three digits! :o)

So, what puckers and dimples and lines and dots has life left on you?