smiles

You know how you come across something, a word or an idea, or even a person, that you haven't seen for ages and suddenly it/he/she pops up one, two, three times in the next ensuing days?   For me it happens most often with a word I've never encountered before and then do, three times.  This  is a little different.  Last week I was describing garter belts and the gap at the top of the thigh, between the edge of the stocking and the beginning of the underpants, a cold place in a Winnipeg winter.  I didn't have a formal name for it (No-Man's Land?). But today I found it.  I'm just reading Jane Gardam's latest book, Last Friends, the third in her wonderful trilogy, and I have just read of a court case argued in the past between the two lawyers, each the protagonist of one of the novels.  The case was being argued before a judge concerning a poor challenged kid who shovelled dung in a circus and who for kicks would take a long straw and go under the bleachers where he would stick it up through the slats and tickle the private parts of the ladies. As you know, says the narrator, ladies' tights hadn't been invented, "and there were all these pale pink arcs of skin between the stocking-tops and the knickers. Schoolgirls,I believe, used to call the gaps 'smiles' or 'sights'." And the boy was charged for tickling all the smiles. Well!  You learn something every day.