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If you've ever wondered what carefree at 60 looks like, this is it. That photo was taken on a Saturday in July at Carol's house, which has the best pool of anyone in our friend group and which Carol holds over us constantly and we allow it because it's a genuinely great pool. The original plan was lunch. Just a normal lunch. Then someone, and I'm not naming names but her name rhymes with Sandra, said "it's too hot, we should get in the pool" and within about four minutes we were all in swimsuits standing on the edge. I should tell you that the three of us have a combined sixty-one years of saying we'd get into swimsuits "when we felt ready." When we'd lost a bit more weight. When the skin situation had sorted itself out. When things were a bit more, you know, where we wanted them to be. This is a sentence that women tell themselves in their thirties and forties and apparently also their fifties until one day someone says "it's too hot" and the sentence just stops mattering. Sandra had been talking about this body oil for weeks. Besque Magic Body Oil. Every phone call, every coffee, every time we saw her she had something new to report about her skin. We love Sandra but we had started muting slightly whenever she got onto the topic. Then she showed up at Carol's and made us both touch her legs and we unmuted very quickly. She'd been using it every morning. Just five minutes after her shower, massaging this oil made from cold pressed natural ingredients into her skin, and calling it her non-negotiable. Sandra has described many things as non-negotiable over the years, including a particular brand of biscuit and her Wednesday yoga class, but this one we now understand. Her skin had this quality to it that we couldn't quite name. Smooth, yes. But more than that. Like it had been looked after properly for the first time in a long time. Full. Alive. The kind of skin that makes you want to immediately interrogate the person about their entire routine. We both ordered it that afternoon, sitting by the pool on our phones like two women who had seen the light and were not wasting another minute. That was three months before the jumping photo. Here is what I can tell you about those three months. The five minutes every morning became something I genuinely looked forward to. There's something about taking that small amount of time, deliberately, just for yourself, with something that smells real and feels genuinely luxurious, that changes the texture of the whole day. My skin changed too. The roughness on my arms that I'd had for years, that sandpapery feeling I'd stopped noticing because it had become normal, faded over about six weeks. My legs felt different. The crepey patches on my thighs that had been living there rent-free since my mid-fifties softened in a way that made me suspicious at first and then just grateful. I stopped wearing the sarong by the end of month two. I'm not sure exactly when. I just noticed one day that I hadn't reached for it. So that Saturday at Carol's, when Sandra said it was too hot, something was different about the calculation. There was no quick mental audit before the swimsuit went on. No negotiation with the mirror. No position adjustments for the photo. Just three sixty-something women deciding to jump into a pool on a hot Saturday because why on earth not. The dog had concerns. We overruled him. We were in that pool for three hours. We ordered pizza at five. Sandra did a handstand in the shallow end that nobody asked for and everyone applauded. Carol laughed so hard at one point that she had to hold the pool edge to stay upright. I floated on my back and looked at the sky and felt something I hadn't felt in a really long time. Just completely, entirely, unremarkably fine. Not fine like "I've made peace with it." Fine like there was nothing to make peace with. Fine like this is just a Saturday and I am just a person in it and everything is exactly as it should be. That's it. That's the whole thing. That's what sixty looks like when you stop waiting for it to be something else.