My Grandfather’s Thighs

Yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather’s thighs. I was walking along the shore when a jogger passed me, wearing a pair of significantly shorter shorts than he usually wears. Not that I’d ever seen the man before, but the stretch of skin from his knees to the edge of his black shorts was startlingly white compared to the beach bronzed rest of him. Just like my grandfather’s thighs used to be…

He and my grandmother lived in the South of Portugal, and he was never out of his khaki shorts. Except when he went for a swim. On those rare occasions, he’d come out of the house wearing 70s patterned swimming trunks in different shades of green –in all those years, I never saw him in other trunks. His body was as dark as a local, his stomach generous, his legs skinny and, from the knee up to the waist, the palest milky white. I can still picture him standing at the edge of the pool. He’d wet his chest –ostensibly to ward off a heart attack, but also to make me laugh. It was our inside joke– and swim without moving his legs, letting his arms do all the work. And I used to watch, fascinated by how fluorescent his legs looked underwater.