I was seven years old when I asked my teacher about the mole on her arm.
She had dark hair and fair skin, like me. I had freckles—lots of them—and I was curious. Children are not subtle. If we notice something, we ask about it.
Instead of brushing off my question, she answered gently.
She told me that because I had so many freckles, I should keep an eye on them. She pointed to one on my upper arm in particular and said I should watch it in case it ever wanted to be something else.
She didn’t frighten me.
She didn’t lecture me.
She simply planted a seed of awareness.
And I listened.
For two days, I tried to remember her name.
Then I said her first name out loud—Mary Jane—and “Clawson” came back immediately. I have always liked her name.
Thirty years later, I remembered.
I was thirty-eight years old when that freckle on my upper arm began to change. It developed tiny flecks of blue that hadn’t been there before. It didn’t look dramatic. It didn’t hurt. But it didn’t look the same anymore.
Because of what she had told me when I was seven, I had watched it over the years. Not obsessively. Just attentively.
Around that same time, my youngest son didn’t want to go to school one morning. He said he felt sick. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed him, but I took him to the doctor that day.
By the time we were in the exam room, he seemed fine. The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong. Since we were already there, I asked him to look at the freckle on my arm.
He examined it once—just once—and scheduled me for surgery.
It was malignant melanoma.
Scott was eight at the time. The other kids were teenagers, but they still needed their mother.
So I did what needed to be done.
The surgeon removed the melanoma along with a generous margin of surrounding tissue. I carry the scar on my upper left arm to this day, and another on my leg from the skin graft that closed the wound.
I was seven when Mary Jane Clawson told me to watch that freckle.
I was thirty-eight when I remembered.
She never knew what her quiet advice would mean to me.
But I did.
And I am still here.
Through My Eyes, Gently 