Two people have helped me protect my skin from sun, this year. Both were strangers mere hours prior to my asking for their assistance. The first, under the searing sun of the Gulf of Mexico Coast, was a mother who’d been grieving one son’s death when the other brought her to the beach. There is a part of me just desperate for touch, and the rest of me is terrified of it. I don’t mean anything other than simple, human touch, preferably affectionate (not to be conflated with sexual). The past few years have had many fewer hugs, so many fewer than before, not to mention simple gestures of affection. For me personally, virtually no snuggles. Obviously most folks were never welcome to touch me anyway, but lately that lack of contact is taking its toll. It had a lot to do with her being a mother that I was able to ask Janet to cover the skin of my back that I couldn’t reach: a small area between the upper and lower straps of my swimming top. Just enough space to keep me from going crazy if somebody rubs my fur the wrong way. Just enough space to overwhelm me with longing if the hands work well. Janet’s sunscreen application was fine. I thanked her, laughed at my own nerves, and went to play on the beach with her son’s dog. It would be over a month before I needed to ask someone else to do the same.

In the meantime I was lucky to enjoy several truly high quality, sometimes even loving, hugs from other humans–including a toddler!–and of course dogs along the way. Among these last was Abba, a four month old Basset hound rumored to have been a low energy pup until she’d met her owner, the clerk at the tobacco shop, and danced for the first time. Dogs are often more difficult to leave than humans.

Over 1,100 miles from the bit of sea I shared with Janet and her family, after many more miles of wandering and roaming, I again found myself needing sun-protection in unreachable places. I threw the sunblock in my bag and hoped I could get my bathing suit on surreptitiously; I was in the truck less than five minutes from having been invited, and the boat a half hour after that. Suddenly I was sitting in the stern of a Boston whaler, cruising at about 13 knots over some sparkly blue relative of the Colorado River. Our group was mostly a pontoon boat called Party Barge that held nine retirees who maybe never worked to begin with. When we finally dropped anchor and joined them, there were immediate offers of fancy tequila. At the outset I had supposed there were good candidates for the help I would need, but the journey went on across the water for a while before we settled on that spot. At over 7,000 feet of elevation in the early bluebird afternoon, I had to look to the vessel I was in: it was up to me or the captain of El Barco to prevent injury between my shoulder blades. Had I known how well this guy could apply lotion, I might’ve opted for the sunburn.