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Her name was Elara. She was sixty-seven, a retired botanist, and the reigning “Miss Naturism” from the previous year.

And then there was Elara.

It was the summer of mismatched expectations. I was twenty-three, a junior photo editor for a glossy but unadventurous travel magazine, and my boss had just handed me an assignment I was certain was a prank. miss naturism

On the first day, I kept my camera in my bag. I wore a sundress and felt absurdly overdressed. Everyone else was bare as stones, and after a while, I stopped seeing their bodies as anything remarkable. They were just people: reading, playing pétanque, peeling oranges. A grandfather taught his granddaughter how to skip stones. Two women shared a bottle of rosé and laughed at something on their phone. Her name was Elara

I kept the sunflower on my desk for years. And every time I looked at it, I remembered that the most undressed I had ever felt was not when I finally took off my clothes by the river on the last morning, but when I realized that no one had noticed I was wearing them in the first place. It was the summer of mismatched expectations

I never became a naturist myself. But I kept one thing from that valley: a small, hand-carved sunflower that Elara sent me after the article came out. On the back, in her careful script, she had written:

I flew to the Côte d’Azur, rented a tiny car, and drove inland to a valley where the air smelled of thyme and pine resin. The naturist resort was a collection of low, whitewashed buildings tucked into a hillside. No fences, no high walls. Just a winding path down to a river where people swam in the golden light of late afternoon.