Sloughing Off
Goodbye to the Year of the Snake
I wanted to say one more goodbye to the old year that has felt like being inside a snake. But first, school glue.
I never ate school glue. So far as I remember anyway. What I do remember is putting a thin layer of white glue on my hand, waiting for it to dry and go clear and feeling this numb feeling of having a false second skin. Then, carefully, peeling off this glue layer most satisfyingly as one big piece. This ghost skin delicately held the shape of whatever part of the hand it was covering. A little cup shape of a finger tip. The imprint of the lines in your palm.
It is this I’m now remembering still burrowed into the middle of this frozen time of year. This time of seedpods, empty shells, and the skeletons of last year’s flowers. Of leafless trees in a slumbering grey parliament. Of off-white gutter icebergs studded with cigarette butts like cloves in a Christmas ham. In short it’s sloughing off season.
It can’t be just me. Isn’t every living thing now clothed in a fine layer of old self? Don’t we somehow, uncomfortably, privately, inexorably and snakily itch to push the new out from under the old? Isn’t it time?
And I am thinking about outer layers because my skin is peeling. And my skin is peeling because I am riding my bike to a teaching hospital three times a week to get full spectrum UV light therapy from an older technician. I can’t remember her name but I delight in her deeply Scottish accent and I love the way she calls my condition “your ahtch” (itch). My time under the UV radiation lights this last time was a bit too much for my usually pretty tough skin and I turned a bit red and then the next day I woke up and my skin felt tight. Like it was actually too small. A day after that it started peeling.
And so, to the shedding. Young snakes can grow out of their own form more than ten times a year. It comes on first as a dullness of temper then their eyes go milky blue and then they rub their head against something rough to rip open up the old skin which they peel back turning it inside out to wriggle free from the twisted sculpture of their old self.
The word for the form left over after a creature sheds its skin or exoskeleton is an exuvia (plural: exuviae). Loosely translated, it comes from the Greek, “to rise up out of a garment.” In snakes and dragonflies and cicada and a few others, this discarded outer shell is a perfect, empty replica of the animal’s former self and can often be found clinging to trees, rocks, or other surfaces frozen in the moment of escape.
And now on the eve of the Lunar new year I wonder if you will join me in one last goodbye to the Year of the Snake. What choice do we have really other than to look back at the ghost of last year, and down at our own garments. Then recognizing this outdated husk of self. What choice do we have but to wriggle free to face, with sensitive, raw, not-yet-hardened skin, whatever it is that comes next.
A forgotten childhood memory of glue finger prints at school came to me with your writing. I’d desperately attempt to hide the shed bits (because I feared the attention I might get for day dreaming)…here’s to the fire horse and the shedding of old skins 🤍
Lepages glue is stuck in my memory from Grade 2 in Oakville back in the 60's and the nipple-like 'spout'.