"Como girafa!"

I met a little girl today - her name was Kelsey - while hanging out at my friend's house in the Stuart neigborhood of Minneapolis. The little girl was a beautiful latina - long black hair, caramel skin, big grin. She was playing with Hershey the dog, who Katie and I were walking back from our trip down the Midtown Greenway.

Kelsey wasn't alone - she had young friends and cousins romping around in the yard with her. Nobody was older than 7 or 8, youngest was probably 3. Summer was fresh on their faces, in the grasstains on their knees, in the breathless way they ran from yard to yard. I loved that they all crowded around the dog laying there in the lawn.

I crouched down to be with them and the dog, and a curious and familiar conversation began to happen.

Kelsey and another little boy pointed to my shoulders which are covered with freckles. They furrowed their brows together, and Kelsey pointed to a patch of them, asking, "What are these on your skin?"

This is not the first time my speckled skin has drawn attention from children. When I visited Thailand in 2004, we lived in a villiage with many young ones. As I walked through the playgrounds to the cabin we were living in - all of us tall, white basketball-playing women - I was always met with pointing and staring. None of them spoke English, however. I only realized what they were laughing at when they got close enough (and brave enough) to touch me. Suddenly they were prodding my arms with their hands - giggling and giving me questioning looks.

These children spoke English, though - even though much of it was laced with Spanish words I understood - so I was finally in a place to explain my particular spotted appearance.

"These are my freckles," I said, and Katie offered the Spanish word "peca" to back up my soon to be wordy explanation.

"But why?" Kelsey asked me.

"You see your skin?" I said, pointing to her arm, "You see how you get brown in the summertime? Well, I do too, but instead of it being an even brown like your pretty skin, I can only have it in spots."

"You can't be in the sun?!" one boy asked, alarmed.

"No, no, I can be in the sun. It just makes me look a little different than you," which I knew wasn't giving them the answer they wanted, so I laughed and offered, "The sun makes me look a little bit like a giraffe."

Katie laughed one of her hearty, lean back laughs, and said, "Girafa!" which of course made Kelsey and her friends laugh, too.

They then moved on to looking at Katie's cell phone, wrapping themselves in blankets and playing tag, and tearing grass out of the lawn.

I'm always oddly happy to be a curiosity - suddenly so foreign. I sometimes forget that even the briefest intersections can leave me feeling like a giraffe, like a funny joke, like someone to stare at. Maybe there doesn't have to be much interesting about me beyond my "markings," and my ability to sit down in the grass with a dog and some children and play.

I like the simplicity of being a giraffe for an afternoon.