Last week, Kyle and I took the boys to Florida for Spring Break.  We flew out in the wee hours of Monday morning, arriving just after noon.  Before we disembarked from the plane, I put on sunscreen.  After lunch at Nine’s favorite Jewish deli (he likes it because both the pancakes and the latkes – potato pancakes, he only eats on a theme – are the size of decorative pillows), a shopping trip for groceries and boogie boards, and the ceremonial Unpacking of the Airbnb, we shed our winter clothes, put on more sunscreen, and headed to the beach.  We spent an hour at the beach before the sun started to set and the supper bell rang.  We ate by the sea – covered in more sunscreen, of course – returning to the Airbnb as the moon was rising in the sky.

That night, as we readied for bed, Kyle pointed to my leg.

“Looks like you got a little sun,” he said.

I followed his gaze to a mud splat of sunburn on my thigh.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

Dear readers, you are in the presence of a dermatological phenomenon.  A frickin’ dermatological phenomenon.  Because no matter the quantity of sunscreen or clothing I don, I get sunburned. Every time.  Every gal-dang frickin’ time.

And it’s always patchy.  Always patchy.  I could have unloaded an entire bottle of sunscreen on said leg, worn two layers of sweatpants, and still would have ended up with a patchy burn.  Sometimes the patches will overlap each other, and sometimes they will exist entirely on their own landmass; no matter what I do to quell it, Vitamin D finds a way.

“Well, at least it will fade into a nice tan!”  You may be thinking, and you’d be wrong.  I go from red to white to red to white – like a barbershop sign, which is the exact signage comparison every woman hopes to have.

This has been the case my entire life.  My 12^th birthday was celebrated in Jamaica; the photographic record shows a frizzy-haired girl smiling hard beneath a head-to-toe layer of zinc oxide.  I spent part of my high school summers on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where I literally glistened both from sweat and aloe vera.  I went to college in Boston – the ocean was calling and I must go – during which I threw in the towel and let the sun etch so deeply into my skin that I was still peeling in the dead of January.  After graduation, I gained both a 401k and the realization that skin cancer ain’t no joke, and started a 20+ year journey to beating the burn…to no avail to date.  I am Sisyphus, pushing my poor, beleaguered skin up a slimy mountain of sunscreen; every time I think I’m reaching the top, I roll right back down into my annual mole check appointment.  Kai mou.

Back to Florida.  The next afternoon, we went to Fort Lauderdale Beach.  This time, I tried both a UV sundress and two different kinds of sunscreen.  I reapplied said sunscreen so many times that Thirteen commented, “Are you bored or something?  Why do you keep putting on suntan lotion?”  I never took off my giant hat.

That night, I had to wrap my body in a cold towel to soothe the burn.

The rest of the trip was more of the same: slather, sun, aloe, repeat.  We took a covered water taxi to Pompano Beach; I burned my neck on that voyage.  We went to Disney World and I wore overall shorts with a t-shirt underneath; my souvenir was an overall strap-shaped sunburn on my shoulders.  We spent time in Las Olas, where we did some shopping and I burned the tops of my hands.  We went to Pompano Beach and sat under a sunshade.  For that, I was rewarded with a burn on my ears (again, never took off the hat).

Our final full day was spent at Dania Beach.  I wore a two-piece suit so that my fellow beachgoers could skip a trip to the art museum and instead enjoy the Jackson Pollock-y nature of my burns.  I sat on a chair in the sand, my giant hat pulled down low, watching the boys play and pointlessly applying more sunscreen.  Finally, I gave in, tossing the lotion bottle and wandering down to the water.  I flopped down at the edge of the surf and let the cold ocean roll over my burns. I sighed; liquid magic.

“Do you want to go somewhere indoors?”  Kyle asked me.

“No,” I said.  “We’ll be back inside soon enough.”

“Maybe next year we should go somewhere further inland,” Kyle said.  “Like Ohio.”

“Don’t be silly; maybe next year I’ll try a beekeeper’s suit,” I said, as the boys boogie boarded along the waves.

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The photo above was taken on the water taxi. I removed my hat for roughly 30 seconds for the photo, which is probably when I got sunburned. I put a video up on my socials from the water taxi day if you want to check it out.

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I wasn’t on North Dakota Today this week because I was in Florida.  Last week, we talked about Minot’s Mayor Tom Ross, my Nice Person of the Week, as Meadowlark Mercantile’s art vending machines. (Valley News Live)

Grand Forks’ Leonora Gershman Pitts can be seen on the big screen in “The Long Run” at the Fargo Film Festival today at the Fargo Theatre. (Grand Forks Herald)

Fort Berthold’s Zig Jackson is one of the featured photographers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Buffalo’s Fire; Found from “Oops Only Good News”)

Bismarck State’s Amanda Morse wears a new cat garment every Wednesday in honor of her self-proclaimed “Whisker Wednesday.” (KFYR TV)

Red Trail Elementary, Beach’s Lincoln Elementary, and Mohall-Lansford-Sherwood Public School have all been named National Blue Ribbon Schools. (KFYR TV)

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