First Lust

So much for my grand teacherly theory. Getting my memoir to fit into this blog is like stuffing boa constrictors into a pillowcase. One little distraction and they’re all out. Now I’m not sure I can blog a whole memoir. If you’d like to try, post your ravings as a comment here and let us see if we should shoot it or feed it.
Now, having said that, I feel better. I can tell you a little more about that knee wall house. It was the location of my first lust.
I was ten and chubby. Thick glasses, stringy ponytail. No sibs—not with those parents—and clumsy. Felt large, dumb, always opening my big mouth to say wrong things. I was grateful for the well-adjusted four kids older and younger than I right across the field next door. Yes, field. Middle Haddam, a village in Nowhere, central Connecticut. Woods, big Connecticut River down the hill half a mile away, remains undeveloped to this day.
When the neighbors got hay for their sheep these kids and I played Doctor and Giant in the neighbors’ haybales. That is, we took down our pants and lay on on the scratchy hay top of each other for no reason I could think of, our legs opened the way we did for the doctor. Like babies having their diapers changed. Unconcerned. Being poked between the legs was rather pleasant. Being noticed by Big Kids was even better. But this was not lust, this was wanting to be one the Big Kids.
The older girls, ten or so, I six or seven, were nervous about a Grownup finding us. Which they did. Their mother called my mother and my mother smacked me hard and made me walk home across that field without even my underpants. I was angry, embarrassed, perhaps shamed, for the first time. I began to understand the Great Grownup Secret: Things done with bottom parts were bad.
“Oversexed.” My mother and father were grim. “We must control this.” Serious spankings, tears, vows to never again, but then again a few more times, furtively. Still, not a twinge of lust, just shameful, secret playing at sex.

But when I was ten, chubby and foolish, I fell in love with a younger brother of a friend of my parents, an older teen my mother said was just a dumb farm boy. He never said a single word but who cared, to me he was a god on long blue-jeaned legs. A younger version of Daddy, now that I look back on it. I flung myself into his surprised lap in our living room, right under my childish bedroom with the cowboy wallpaper and snuggled up to his newly bearded chin. I loved feeling his lean body under me. His manly body stirred something in my bottom parts. I ground my ass into his lap. I wanted to crawl all over him.

Oversexed, all right. My mother must have had a heart attack watching me try to seduce him. He was probably horrified. In spite of her fierce scoldings, the hairbrush, even the belt, the farmboy lit the flame in my groin. A flame she could never, in spite of mighty efforts, extinguish.