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.

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

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,” he said, sliding a thin file across his desk. “The annual pageant in the south of France. Get the spirit of it. Not the… uh, anatomy. The spirit.”

The contestants ranged in age from twenty-two to eighty-one. There was a former truck driver with a glorious beard and a spiderweb tattoo on his shoulder. A young woman with a mastectomy scar who spoke about reclaiming her body from a year of chemotherapy. A retired postal worker who had taken up naturism at sixty and learned to forgive her own reflection.

I opened the file. The first page showed a photograph of a woman with silver-streaked hair, standing on a rocky beach, arms raised to the sun. She was naked, but you didn’t notice that first. You noticed her smile—wide, unforced, the kind of smile you only see on people who have just finished a long swim in cold, clear water.

“You were the youngest contestant there. You just didn’t know it.”