I kept the sunflower on my desk for years. And every time I looked at it, I remembered that the most undressed I had ever felt was not when I finally took off my clothes by the river on the last morning, but when I realized that no one had noticed I was wearing them in the first place.
I raised my camera. For the first time all week, I knew exactly what to capture. miss naturism
When she finished, nobody clapped. There was just a long, soft silence, and then a man near the riverbank began to weep quietly, and someone else handed him a handkerchief. I kept the sunflower on my desk for years
I never became a naturist myself. But I kept one thing from that valley: a small, hand-carved sunflower that Elara sent me after the article came out. On the back, in her careful script, she had written: For the first time all week, I knew exactly what to capture
The title, I learned, had nothing to do with youth or conventional beauty. It was awarded to the person who best embodied the philosophy of the event: integrity, comfort in one’s own skin, and a deep, uncompetitive joy in the natural world. The prize was a hand-carved wooden sunflower.
The contestants ranged in age from twenty-two to eighty-one. There was a former truck driver with a glorious beard and a spiderweb tattoo on his shoulder. A young woman with a mastectomy scar who spoke about reclaiming her body from a year of chemotherapy. A retired postal worker who had taken up naturism at sixty and learned to forgive her own reflection.
I opened the file. The first page showed a photograph of a woman with silver-streaked hair, standing on a rocky beach, arms raised to the sun. She was naked, but you didn’t notice that first. You noticed her smile—wide, unforced, the kind of smile you only see on people who have just finished a long swim in cold, clear water.