THE MODEL

R was our model. As I struggled with my makeshift easel, she offered to help me through the door. I said I was fine but thanks, and entered behind her. Her gait seemed wobbly, as though the leg joints were worn down and slid from side to side. She is slender. She appears to live simply, so I can’t attribute the smoked-chicken tone of her body to tanning. Maybe that’s her natural color. Her age was hard to pin down. She looked old and young at one and the same time. The wrinkles on her chiseled face were prominent enough to notice, while not enough to detract from a sense of youthfulness. I’m guessing she’s in her early 60’s, although Sandi thinks she might be older. Her body is wonderful, with firm breasts—only with imagination can one discern hints of incipient sagging. Wrinkles on her abdomen are concentrated in one or two places, and don’t detract from her otherwise tight skin. While she took lovely poses, none of them showed her back. Her bottom might have been wrinkled, but one of two glimpses of it as she got in and out of poses showed nothing that would detract from her overall appeal to average male tastes (well, to men of a certain age). Her hair was bundled roughly on top of her head. It was a sort of khaki colored—dyed, certainly-- that blended with her skin. She let it down for the final pose, the subject of this drawing. Her vulva was surprisingly narrow. The facts of her age, personality and physical appearance made me think of her as someone I could have known well but never seen naked. I prefer to think of her that way.