The "honeymoon" post, After the Wedding, rated C for caution, precedes this episode of my memoir.

"Lady of the house," is a phrase I haven't heard much, outside of an old Rolling Stones song, for a few decades.  There were not many telemarketers in the 'fifties, but when a pollster or salesman phoned he'd routinely ask for the lady or man "of the house." 

Ford and I didn't have a phone in our first house, and I don't remember any salesmen ever knocking on our door.  If one had, he would surely have asked for my mother.  It happened on several occasions later on in other homes I had.  I was the lady of that house and that knowledge made me feel all grown up and important.  I was still almost a decade away from the realization that no sane woman would ever want to be a lady, but don't let me get ahead of the story here.   I was fourteen, looked younger, and sounded younger still.  I still, in my sixties, have a child's voice.

I didn't think about this much at the time, but there was a marked difference between the way my mother reacted to my marriage, and the way we were treated by Ford's stepfather's big extended family.  Mama's habitual tactic for expressing displeasure or disapproval, and for coercing compliance, was withholding affection and attention. She ignored Ford as if he didn't exist and shut me out completely for
a while, until she gradually came around to acceptance.  At the time of the wedding and for weeks afterward, she avoided us, cut us cold.  She didn't actually say she disowned me, but that was how she acted.

Ford and his two younger brothers were accepted and treated as part of their stepfather's family, no different from anybody else.  That might have been partially due to their mother, one of the sweetest, most loving and generous people I have ever known.  That the boys were war orphans might also have influenced their unconditional acceptance.  Ford's father was killed in World War II and his first stepfather died in Korea.  Mostly, I think loving inclusiveness was just the way that family was.

It was a close and interdependent family.  Uncles and aunts had lives and homes of their own, but they got together at their parents' place for communal meals on holidays and every Sunday.  I was invited to those gatherings even before I married Ford, but I had no real appreciation of the family dynamics then.  I was an only child, a loner, "shy" from feeling inferior and inadequate, inclined to embarrassment if anyone spoke to me, and filled with shame over the circumstances of my illicit relationship with Ford and the way I had manipulated my mother's consent to the marriage.  I denied it to myself and covered those feelings with false pride,

Sex was not discussed, so the assumption among everyone outside our immediate families was that I was pregnant and we'd had to get married.  It gave me some satisfaction knowing that I wasn't pregnant when I got married, a manufactured satisfaction, some self-consolation that I needed in order to build my ego up and feel a little better about myself.  The big family gatherings were uncomfortable occasions for me, like being dropped into an alien environment.  I never knew what to say or how to act, and had no idea whether anyone or everyone knew the details of our marriage.

The little house that my stepfather-in-law's grandparents had lived in was old.  In a drier climate or one with a heavier winter snow load, it would have been a moldering pile of boards.  On the dry North Texas plains, it still stood, but not quite upright.  It had been built in a time when window glass was expensive and had to be shipped from far away.  Each room had only one window, made up of numerous small panes of glass in wooden frames.  One of my first tasks there was to spread putty (with a putty knife, of course) in the gaps around the panes where the old putty had flaked away, so that the glass didn't rattle in the frames and let in the wind.  It was a skill I had learned from my father before he died when I was seven, one of the simple tasks he had allowed me do when I begged him to let me help.

The only other task we had to do before moving in was repairing the roof over the kitchen lean-to on the back of the house.  The uncles dropped off a bundle of asphalt shingles and a paper bag of roofing nails with rubber washers, their points bursting through the heavy brown paper.  Ford carried a ladder over from his mother's house, and I salvaged an old broken-handled saucepan from a junkpile behind our little house to hold the nails.

We spent a happy but exhausting day sitting on that roof in the cool winter sunshine, slotting shingles together and nailing them down.  It was a small lean-to.  The roof was probably less than a hundred square feet, but neither of us was used to swinging a hammer.  My forearms ached, I had broken several fingernails down into the quick, and had abrasions on my hands and knees from crawling on the gravelly surface of the shingles, by the time we quit and went to supper at my mother-in-law's house.

The next day, one of the uncles came by and inspected our work.  He said we'd done an excellent job of securely nailing down those shingles, but we had to take them all up and do it again.  We'd started at the top, overlapping each new course so that rain would run down under the shingles, not pass over them.  Undoing our work and doing it right was a two day job.  My mother-in-law looked at my bloody hands and suggested that I let Ford do  the work.  I remember pulling most of the nails with a claw hammer the first morning, because I could do it with more finesse than Ford could manage, without damaging the shingles.  He did most of the nailing down.  I brought him sandwiches and Kool-Aid in colored aluminum tumblers to drink, and took breaks from my window washing and floor scrubbing to stand on the ladder and keep him company.

The family had the water and electricity turned on for us.  Wiring and plumbing had been added sometime after the house was built. The wires were old, with woven fabric insulation, and they were all visible, not concealed within the walls.  The lights were bare bulbs hanging on the electrical wire from the high ceilings.  The kitchen had a turn-button switch on the wall, and the front room had a short length of ball chain hanging from the socket in the middle of the room.  We moved the bed away from the wall and Ford steadied me as I climbed onto the iron bedstead to tie a string to the pull chain so we could reach it.

When we were ready to move in, as soon as the roof was done, while Ford was out looking for a job, his mother took me to a small country grocery store a few miles from town, where they didn't sell nationally advertised brands but the prices were lower than in any of the local supermarkets.  I bought ground beef for 19 cents a pound (it was 25 to 29 cents in town) and a selection of canned vegetables at ten cans for a dollar, as much as half off the price I'd have paid in town.  I stocked up on macaroni and dry beans, a bag of #2 potatoes for next to nothing, staples such as sugar and salt, and had plenty to feed my husband and me for over a week, at a cost of less than ten dollars.

Grandma and the aunts gave us featherbed mattresses for the old iron bed, quilts to keep us warm, worn muslin sheets, flour sack pillow cases and curtains, and a few pots and pans.  I had the wheat pattern dishes I had been collecting, one free piece a week from Safeway, and a few other items Mama had urged me to put away for my "hope chest," including the trendy aluminum tumblers and a set of seven flour sack dishtowels I had embroidered using iron-on transfers with the days of the week and a different picture for each day, depicting church on Sunday, laundry on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, etc.

High on the walls of each room were protruding stubs of gas pipe, covered with threaded plumber's caps, where the gaslights had been removed.  There was a rusty old hand pump in the yard that only needed a little priming, and a lot of pumping, to bring up water from the deep well.  That area is red dirt country.  The red clay gets in everything, staining clothing and curtains.  Water from the town reservoir left rusty stains in sinks and in the clothing washed in it, and had a metallic flavor.  The well water was clearer and tasted better than what came through the pipes, so I kept a jar of it -- a gallon pickle jar -- in the kitchen for drinking.

That winter, we lived in only half the old house, keeping the other room shut off to conserve heat.  We used natural gas for fuel, burned in a little freestanding cast iron heater with filagreed ceramic inserts above the gas jets.  When hot, the ceramic gave off a warm orange glow, but not much discernible heat in that high ceilinged room designed for summer comfort, with walls that leaked wind.  The heater was connected to the gas valve in the wall by a rubber hose.  We had to keep the hose stretched out to its full extent to avoid setting the wall on fire, and more than once one of us tripped over it and overturned the heater or popped the hose off the valve and had to scramble to shut off the gas before it ignited and/or exploded.

We didn't have a radio or TV.  We had my record player and a few records I listened to when he was out, because Ford didn't share my taste in music and I hadn't collected any country and western records.  I was used to reading a lot for entertainment, but Ford resented my reading when he was around.  He wanted my attention, so we talked a lot.  I started getting to know the man I had married.

He talked a lot about "Grandpa KC," his brothers' father's father.  My MIL and the three boys had lived with him when the little boys' father had gone away to war.  She worked during the day and left Grandpa in charge of the boys. The old man  was a cripple, needing a cane to get around, and then with difficulty.  He usually just sat in a rocking chair on the front porch and drank a lot. 

He didn't have the income to support his habit.  When Ford was five or six years old, the old man had taught him to beg.  He would send the little boy out and tell him not to return until he could come back with a bottle of Old Overholt.  Apparently, someone in that little Oklahoma town, knowing that the old man was a cripple, was willing to sell whiskey to a little boy for his grandfather.  If he came back without it, he'd be beaten with the old man's cane. 

When the old man was drunk, sometimes he'd beat Ford for no reason at all, saying that was for all the things he'd done and thought he'd gotten away with.  Sometimes, he'd share his whiskey with the boy.  If Ford had begged enough to buy an extra half-pint, he'd stash one for himself.  When I met him, he had already been a binge alcoholic for a decade or so.

He told me many different stories of various abuses: physical, mental, and verbal.  What I recall about them is the theme, the basic gist, of victimhood and brutality.  Although I was too ignorant at the time to understand that abused chidren grow up to be abusers, it explained for me why Ford's feeling for his second stepfather was so much warmer and more positive than anything I'd ever felt for any of my own stepfathers. 

He had rescued the boys and their mother from that brutal old man.  Now he and his extended family were rescuing Ford and me from our youthful folly, by providing us a home and the material necessities for a start in life.  At the time, I felt appropriately grateful for and appreciative of each gift, but I had never fully realized until now the true magnitude of the help they gave us, or how difficult life would have been if that family was more like my mother and her family.

Mother did come around, before Christmas that year.  We had been married a couple of weeks, Ford was out on his job search, and I was home alone when she knocked on our door.  She came inside briefly, declined to sit down, and stood just inside the door as she gave me our Christmas present from herself and Bill, my stepfather.  It was a Christmas card with some paper money in it, I don't recall how much.  I suppose that in my mother's mind it represented a peace offering, maybe.  She might have viewed it more as a contribution to my welfare.  Her attitude and demeanor didn't indicate any acceptance of my married state, and she was visibly uncomfortable in my house.  She delivered the gift and was gone. 

Ford and I spent the unexpected windfall on some small Christmas presents for his little brothers.  I had been using some of the flour sacks the aunts had given me, embroidering tea towels for my mother-in-law.  Ford had found an old but quality full-tang sheath knife in the junk pile when we moved into that house.  He bought a scrap of leather and used it to make a stacked leather grip and a sheath for the knife, as a gift for his stepfather.

Christmas brought ham, turkey, and more food than we could all eat even though there were too many of us for the number of chairs around Grandma's big dining room table, the kitchen table with all its leaves in, and a scattering of card tables, so some the aunts just picked from the pots and ate on the run as they kept the dishes coming from the kitchen.  On New Years, I was initiated into the tradition of black-eyed peas with a coin cooked in the pot that signified a year's good luck to the family member who received it.  That year, it was one of the young boy cousins and he was tickled pink.

The next episode following this one is Emancipated Minors.

I remember how I felt the night of my wedding, in that cheap and smelly motel room after my mother dropped us off and drove away.  I had mixed feelings.  At this stage of my life, now, I always have mixed feelings and I acknowledge and accept them.  Back then, I was more inclined to deny or dismiss whichever feelings it suited me not to accept.

Sometimes, I would suppress joy or optimism out of fear that I'd jinx myself.  Many times I talked myself into expecting a worst case scenario so that no matter what happened, it would be a pleasant surprise.  I loved happy surprises and hated "bad" ones.  Everything in my life has always had at least two sides, but in my youth I tended to choose one and ignore the rest.

On my wedding night, I swallowed my fear because I was determined that my mother was not going to be proven right.  My marriage was made in heaven.  It would work out.  Ford and I would live happily ever after.  I would show her.  We would show them.  Ford expressed similar sentiments.  It was us against the world, and against the two of us the world didn't have a chance.  If he was as scared and uncertain as I was, he never expressed it to me, and I was working so hard to hide my fear from myself that I certainly didn't reveal it to him.

The first part of the night was a sex feast, as we tried different positions and talked to each other about our feelings and physical sensations.  We were quiet about it, no moans or screams, only some talking in whispers.  It was the first time that our lovemaking hadn't been conducted in total silence, the first time we didn't need to hide it.  That alone made the experience special.  For me, being married, belonging to someone who belonged to me, was a big turn on.  I was such an insecure, needy, nincompoop -- naive enough to believe that those vows had some supernatural power.

Our first time that night was the usual missionary position.  Ford finished fast, leaving me hanging, and we cuddled until he was erect and ready to go again.  That time he suggested we do it "doggy style," a phrase I'd never heard before that night.  I could guess, anyhow, what it meant, so at least I didn't have to have it explained to me.  Again, Ford finished without me, but not quite as quickly as the first time.  I was having fun, anyway, enjoying the sensations.  In retrospect, my husband's initial orgasms served as my foreplay.

The next time he was ready to go, he lay on his back and told me to get on top.  That time, through a combination of his taking longer to get off and my being able to make better clitoral contact, I had the first orgasm of my life that wasn't self-inflicted.  I finished that time before he did, went limp, rolled off him, and almost fell asleep while he was pumping away trying to get his rocks off.  He fell asleep immediately afterward, and I lay there with my head on his shoulder, feeling euphoric, and thinking, "This is my husband!"  The emotions accompanying that thought were amazement, pleasure and pride.

In later days, I let my husband know that it was better for me when I could get off, but he had his own preferences.  That night and for the rest of our married life, he never made an effort to help me achieve orgasm.  It wasn't important to him.  Sometimes if he was tired, or feeling magnanimous when I asked, he'd let me get on top and get off.  Otherwise, it was just the same old up and down.  I accepted what I got, and in the beginning I just felt lucky because sex was never quite as awful as my mother had made it out to be.

That night, after his third orgasm and my first, we slept.  In the morning, we called Ford's mom and she picked us up.  It had been arranged that we would stay at their house while we worked on Grandpa and Grandma's old house, less than a block away, to make it livable.  He, his two brothers, their mother and stepfather lived in what had once been a ranch house before the ranch was subdivided and my step father-in-law's parents and his younger brothers and sisters moved to a house in the middle of town.  By the time Ford and I married, most of those step-uncles and aunts were married and out on their own.  The old wood frame house rambled, with several lean-to additions.  Ford's room was at the back, had once been the dining room off the kitchen.  Its isolation from other bedrooms gave us some privacy at night even though there was no door, just a wide open archway between his room and the kitchen.

I remember sitting at my MIL's kitchen table that morning, my first as a married woman, drinking coffee as she worked around me.  She was cooking, setting the table, talking, making plans for picking up my things from Mama's house, getting things we'd need to set up housekeeping in the old house.  I heard her step up behind me and gasp, then I felt a sharp pain as she pulled a hair out of the top of my head.

She reached over my shoulder and handed me the hair, snow white, and said with surprise, "Marriage must not agree with you.  You're going gray-headed already."  It may not have been a hair that had lost its pigment and gone gray.  My hair has always been a mix of many colors, from deep auburn to strawberry blonde.  Later on, while I was in prison, one of my butch friends used to enjoy sitting in the sun and collecting one hair of this color, one of that....  That hair my MIL found was silver, platinum, white, no doubt about it.  For a long time after that, I kept expecting them all to turn white, but they didn't.  They still haven't, but occasionally I find white ones in my hairbrush.  When they lose their color they seem to lose their grip.  I'll probably be bald before I'm gray.

Before I get on with the story, I want to respond to a comment left by ItzaRoos on the (protected) Womanhood post.

In mainstream American culture, marriage is no longer viewed as quite so necessary as it used to be.  Even though birth control pills were not available then but are now, and abortion was illegal then, teen pregnancy rates are still high, but I frankly don't know how they compare to what they were then (and don't suppose anyone really knows accurately, since such shameful secrets were often well hidden).  It is more socially acceptable now, and therefore more feasible and comfortable for a girl to have a baby and give it away or raise it as a single mother.

There were regional differences even then in the prevalence of early marriage, but I think socioeconomic factors had more to do with that than did geography.  In the rural South, and in poverty pockets wherever, girls were not expected to finish school and there was pressure for them to marry and relieve their fathers of the burden of their support.  Relatively few women had careers, or even jobs.  Often, they married older men.  What I did, marrying a sixteen-year-old when I was fourteen, was unusual even then, even in the Texas Panhandle.

About that other matter, my unapologetic openness, I suppose it comes mostly from the self-acceptance I have learned through psychotherapy and the path of spiritual development I have been following for more than half my lifetime now.  I consciously work to transcend fear and denial.  Accepting myself as I am now is pretty easy, because for a long time I have been living by this one rule:  "Do nothing to damage your self-esteem."  Accepting myself as I used to be isn't always so easy, but I make the effort. 

There was a long hiatus in my memoir writing before I got to where I could start telling this part of my story.  I had to deal with feelings I had repressed for decades, and had to work to recover memories of events that I had worked to forget.  As I said in a recent post, if I told this story from my current perspective, it would be short and not very interesting:  "I was nuts, and I did stupid things."  To tell a story that would be worth reading, I had to get back into the mind of that ignorant, foolish, fearful, emotionally needy young woman and let her tell the story.  In the process, I discovered that I actually like her... wouldn't want to be her, but she has her points.

The protected Womanhood episode mentioned above preceded the public wedding episode that precedes the protected post that is coming up next.  I'll remind everyone that these posts are protected not because I want to hide anything.  Xanga has to conform to standards of public decency, and some people believe that some subjects are not fit for the eyes of children.  I don't share that belief, never censored what my son Doug said, or what he read or viewed, and am pleased with the attitudes and mentality he developed as a result.  I simply feel I have too much invested in this site to allow it to be shut down before I'm done with it.  It is a compromise--a lousy, stinking, unjust, expletive deleted culturally and religiously biased violation of my (and your) First Amendment rights, but I'll live with it unless I find a workable alternative.

This week's subject is suggested by Spongebobpal.

Refreshing

We had a couple of days of refreshing rain recently.

...but the first image that popped into my mind when I saw this week's topic was the one below, from late May, 2003.

I must remember not to take an unopened pack of camera batteries out in the field without a knife to open them.   Jagged plastic makes painful cuts.  First thing I did after I got the new batteries in the camera was to document what I'd done to my thumb.

 I took some pictures this morning to illustrate what I was saying a few days ago about what bark beetles do to spruce trees.  In the shot above there are several healthy young trees with their conical shape and pointy tops, from the center to the right edge.  The two tallest trees, on the left , illustrate the way they look after being infested with beetles:  tall, skinny, with short branches and heavy topknots full of seed cones.  The skinny black things are spruces already killed by the beetles.  The next shot is zoomed in on the top of the tallest tree there.

---

While I was out there, I checked up on the progress of the decomposing moose parts in the turnaround.  There are a number of rocks there that weren't there before, and from the way part of the ribcage is broken, it looks as if someone was throwing rocks at it.  See the dark channel between the two ribs right of center?  Something has chewed the meat out of that intercostal space.  I'm thinking it was a rodent.  I'd like to have watched that.

So much of the calf's hide is gone now that many of its bones are visible.  The person who dumped the stuff there had taken the cow's hind legs and left both of her forelegs.  On this trip, I only saw one of her legs, so something or someone has dragged the other one away.

December, 1958, North Texas

I don't have pictures of the wedding in 1958, my first "real" one.  Nobody took any.  Here is a picture of my first wedding, circa 1950, instead.  That's not my first husband, Ford, of course.  It is one of my first playmates, Donald Ray Walker.  Memory is such an interesting thing.  I can smell the petroleum scent of those dusty old wax roses as they softened in the hot sun.  There were no flowers, wax nor otherwise, at the real first wedding.

Among the many questions my mother asked during the discussions of my marriage to Ford were issues such as where and how we would live.  His step-father's family solved the former problem by offering to let us live in the old house where "Grandma and Grandpa" had lived until the end of their lives.  It had been sitting empty for years, and needed furniture as well as some repair, but they would help us deal with all of that, and it would be ours, rent-free.

Ford and I had talked about income and living expenses.  Each of us received Social Security survivor's benefits from our fathers.  Mine was $56.40 a month, and his was the same or close to it.  We figured we could live on that until he found a job.  He wouldn't consider letting me get a job, and at fourteen there was a little matter of child labor laws, anyway.  Maybe I could have done some babysitting, but he wanted to provide for me.  Whatever he wanted was all right with me.

Our mothers burst that little fantasy bubble for us.  Our marriage would end our eligibility for the Social Security.  They would cash the December checks and give us the money, but there would be no checks for us in January.  I had a few dollars in my piggy bank.  Ford didn't have that, but he was confident that he would find a job right away.  Nothing was going to deter us.

My mother-in-law-to-be phoned the preacher of their church as soon as we had our license.  They made an appointment for Thursday evening at his home, a trailer somewhere near the church, I suppose.  I don't know, because I was never in the church and never saw the neighborhood by daylight.

I had a new dress, paid for out of that final Social Security check:  $7.88 on sale, cheap light blue double-knit with a contrasting brown and white ribbed collar and fake pocket flaps.  I didn't like it, but it was the best of a cheap lot.  I didn't want to spend the money, would rather have worn my full red skirt and stiff petticoats with an embroidered peasant blouse, but Mama and Ford's mom thought I should be wed in a new dress.  "Marry in red, you'll wish you were dead," Ford's mother said.

The dress took care of "new" and "blue".  For "old", I wore a heart-shaped locket and expansion-band bracelet with a "K" engraved on each, that my father had bought for me when I was small.  Ford's mother loaned me a lace-edged hankie.  I ended up carrying the hankie in my hand because I had no pockets, and it got twisted all out of shape from my nervousness.  Ford wore something semi-dressy, not his usual casual clothes, and he looked uncomfortable in them, but showed no nervousness.   His posture and voice projected pride.

Ford guided me with a hand on my back along the narrow path to the preacher's door.  Mama had driven us there, but declined to go inside.  She waited in the car.  The preacher's wife let us in and apologized for her husband's absence before disappearing back into her kitchen.  He was working late, on his day job.  He got there about forty-five minutes late, in grubby work clothes covered with cement dust.  He vanished into the back of the trailer after a brief greeting and apology for being late.  When he came back, his sleeves were rolled up, and his hands, face, and stringy forearms were clean and damp but his hair and everything else were still gray with dust.

The first thing we had to do was correct his misconception.  He thought that Thursday night was to be the rehearsal, and the wedding would come later.  When he understood that we wouldn't be using the church or inviting guests, etc., he seemed confused.  I'm sure the preacher and his wife found the whole thing peculiar, even for a shotgun wedding.    Finally, with a shake of his head, he shifted gears and started counseling us on the sacred responsibilities of marriage and family life.  We nodded our agreement and muttered our understanding and waited for him to get on with it. 

Eventually, the preacher reached the conclusion that we were determined to go through with it, asked to see the license, and brought his skinny, mousy little wife out of the kitchen to witness the ceremony.  He read from a cheat sheet that he'd unfolded from its place in a bible, we each said, "I will," and it was done.  It had some of the earmarks of a shotgun wedding, without any of the usual concessions to appearances.  Any wounds we suffered were self-inflicted.  They signed the license, the preacher kept the form for filing, and gave Ford a certificate, which he folded and stuck in his pocket.

After we picked our way back out the dark pathway to Mama's car, she drove us to a motel on the edge of town, where Ford's step-uncles had reserved and paid for a room for our wedding night, our honeymoon.

The next installment will be a protected post.

Okay, you say, I am in Alaska and cold weather should come as no surprise.  Maybe surprise is an overstatement, but dammit I noticed the chill this morning when I went to the outhouse.  I noticed it enough to look at the thermometer.  It was in the thirties (F) and the sun had been up for a couple of hours by then, after having been down for only about four hours.  End of June, beginning of July is the warmest part of the year here.  This morning felt like August:  foggy and chill.  The fog has burned off by now, but the breeze coming in the window is still too cool for such a sunny day.  It's weird.

My friend lupa mentioned a sense of not-rightness about the characterization of my announcing my protected posts as, "tacky, actually - sorta like lifting my skirt just a little to flash my underwear."  She is correct.  I seldom wear a skirt.  The last time was about four years ago.  When I did psychic readings in a booth at festivals and fairs, I'd dress in long skirts, but everyday wear for me is, and has been for my entire life, jeans or sweats.  I just thought the image of flashing from under a skirt was preferable to the mental picture of me dropping my pants.

This reminds me of one of the first times I ever saw Jewel on stage - Jewel?  Know who I mean?  The formerly Alaskan singer-songwriter?  Yes, that one.  She lifted her skirt repeatedly, proudly showing the new pretty panties underneath.  She was about three years old at the time, performing at the Alaska State Fair with her parents, the folk-gospel duo, Atz and Nedra Kilcher.  Did you know that Jewel's last name is Kilcher, and that she has been onstage literally her whole life?

But I digress.  I displaced Doug here with the promise that I'd be brief.  After he finishes his current project and goes to bed, I'll probably write the next installment of memoirs.  I seem to be on a roll there.

When does a girl become a woman?  The answer to that question, I know, is a matter of culture.  Generally, the feminist answer is, when she begins to menstruate.  In the patriarchal culture of my youth, perpetuated in movies, fairy tales and soap opera, some people believed that it took a man to turn a girl into a woman.  Penetration of the hymen by a penis had that magical, mystical power.  In this polyglot culture of ours, in the absence of a single monolithic tradition and orthodox rites of passage, we must wing it.  In my case, there were complications.

By the time I had my first menstrual period, at age ten (or maybe eleven), I had been orgasmic for three years, had read the little book about where babies come from, and had my hymen accidentally ruptured by my mother while she was applying ointment for a yeast infection I contracted after taking antibiotics.  I had been earnestly seeking a boy to wave his magic wand in my direction ever since Leroy Coy first groped, stroked, petted and teased me in the back row at the movies when I was eight or nine.  If I hadn't been prospecting among my age cohort, I might have found someone sooner, but I had never been attracted to men much older than myself.

At thirteen, I had no doubt that I was a woman.  There were the biological markers of menstruation, breasts and body hair.  There were also a number of adult responsibilities, such as keeping my mother's checkbook balanced, filling out tax returns, routine automobile maintenance, fix-it chores such as replacing faucet washers or driving nails and screws, setting and emptying mousetraps:  all those things that there was often no man around our house to do and Mama either didn't know how or didn't think of as "woman's work."

Mama held ambiguous beliefs.  On the one hand, she had told me I was a woman when I started menstruating.  On the other hand, she continually referred to me as her "baby," and never hesitated to express how much she hated to see her baby grow up.  During my father's lifetime, he had been my advocate for freedom and independence.  When he died, Mama's overprotection went unchecked, at the same time that she laid a lot of Daddy's former responsibilities on me and, due to her work schedules, left me unsupervised much of the time.  Knowing her hangups about sex, even though I wanted her to think of me as grown-up, I certainly didn't tell her about my having had sex with Ford in the back of a Chevy.

My boyfriend had dropped out, but I was still in school and not allowed to go out on school nights.  Both of our mothers and both of our step-fathers began to complain about all the time we spent "tying up the phone lines."  In those conversations, there were avowals of love, confessions of loneliness and eagerness to get together at the next opportunity.  We might have talked about other things, too.  I remember that we both liked the Pogo comic strip, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly, so we might have talked about them.  Mama had taught me that boys like girls who share their interests, so we probably talked about any subject Ford brought up.  I really don't recall much except for the mushy stuff.

I also don't recall how often we had sex after that, but it wasn't many times and was always fraught with difficulties.  I suppose that, even though she never once mentioned it to me, Mama had known about or at least suspected my lost virginity about as soon as it happened.  Her knowing, and her not talking about it, both would have been typical for her.  There wasn't much I could ever get away with around her, and sex was something she just never talked about except in the most vague and euphemistic terms.

Our mothers were in cahoots to keep us separated or else chaperoned.   We messed around a lot, stole kisses and caresses, but had very few chances to really do the dirty.  In the slang of the times, by the way, it was, "making it," or "balling."  People of our parents' generation usually said, "screwing."  I could always tell whether Ford had the phone to himself or if there was someone else in the room by whether he said he couldn't wait until he could see me again, or if he said he couldn't wait until his next chance to ball me.

At his house, one or both of his little brothers could be counted on to follow us around or to pop up at odd moments.  Even so, we did manage at least once to have sex on Ford's bed in the back bedroom of their house.  It didn't take long:  no foreplay, just a little up and down, in and out and he was done.  Life was foreplay at that time.  We both went around aroused and ready constantly.  When we made it, it did feel good and always left me wanting more.  Eventually, before long, Ford would be wanting it again, too.

One evening at my house, Ford and I were on the couch watching TV.  My step-father's sister, Bee, the crazy kleptomaniac old maid, was in her room with my little dog Button.  Mama and Bill were in their room watching something different on TV.  When Mama and Bill moved in together, it gave us a second TV in the household, something few people in our socioeconomic class had in 1958.

That night, we sat side by side on the couch and cuddled and kissed as long as we could stand it.  I moved onto his lap and after a little squirming around, feeling his erection through his jeans and my clothes, I turned to face him, straddling his lap, with my full skirt and two crinoline petticoats spread around me.  He unzipped, popped his penis out of his jeans, pushed the crotch of my panties to one side and slipped himself into me.

And that's the moment when Bee, standing in the hallway between the front room and her bedroom door, pitched Button through the doorway and chased after him, shrilling, "Buttons! Come to Momma, little Buttons."  It wasn't the first time she'd ever pulled something like that.  It was one of the old bat's favorite moves.

Ford and I went motionless.  We and Bee glared at each other as she tried to catch Button.  It took a while.  Since she was staring at us and not looking where she was going, she collided with the little black dog, who hadn't had time to recover from being tossed into the room, and booted him under my bed.  He wouldn't come out, so she had to crawl under the bed and drag him out. 

The interruption had broken the spell, spoiled the moment, deflated the erection.  As Bee left the room with Button tucked under her arm, she looked at us, shook her head slowly back and forth, and stroked one forefinger down the other in a shame-on-you gesture.  I hovered over Ford's lap, covering him with my skirt long enough for him to get himself put away and zipped up, then I sat primly back down next to him in case Bee decided to tattle on us.

That may have been the first time the subject of marriage came up.  We both knew that if we were married nobody could keep us from balling each other whenever we felt like it.  There hadn't been, and never would be, anything like a formal proposal and acceptance, no engagement ring.  We just knew we were going to get married, just as soon as we could find a way.

That Thanksgiving, 1958, Ford's step-father's huge extended family was planning their usual gathering at Grandma's house.  It was a mid-day feast.  Since Mama and Bill both had to work that day - she in a cafe, he in a gas station - our Thanksgiving dinner was scheduled for the evening, and I was doing almost all the cooking.  I wanted to invite Ford, and nobody had any objections.  It was to be the first meal I would cook for my future husband.

I was already an experienced and fairly skillful cook, but I had never roasted a turkey before.  I had the Joy of Cooking, which I'd gotten with Blue Chip Stamps.  Mama and I had baked pie ahead of time, and we bought brown'n'serve rolls for the dinner.  I stuffed my turkey and put it into the oven on time, and went on preparing Jello salad and other side dishes, basting the turkey every half hour as the cookbook said.  Bee was pretty much staying out of my way, having gotten herself in trouble with her brother by sabotaging a blackberry cobbler I'd made the previous summer.

It was getting close to time for everyone to get there, and my potatoes were boiled and ready to mash, when I discovered I didn't have any milk to put in the mashed potatoes.  There was some buttermilk.  Thinking that it would make the mashed potatoes extra special, I used it.  I had all the dishes prepared and either keeping cold in the fridge or warm on the stove, and the table was set.  The turkey didn't look right, but I wasn't too alarmed because I'd been following directions.

Mama, Bill, and Ford got there about the same time.  When I pulled the turkey out of the oven, Mama noticed that it wasn't browned and asked me how long it had been cooking.  Apparently, I was too slow with the basting procedure and our oven was too slow to get up to the right temperature after each opening, and the turkey wasn't even close to done.  Dinner would be delayed.  Mama took over the turkey.  Too hungry to wait, and wanting to get to bed on time, Bill sat down with a full plate of the "trimmings."  That was when I learned that buttermilk is not such a great idea in mashed potatoes.

In retrospect, the meal wasn't spoiled.  We had stuffing and sweet potatoes, so it was no hardship to do without the sour mashed potatoes.  An extra hour at a slightly higher oven temp with no interruptions for basting, and the turkey was beautifully browned and done clear through.  Everything else was delicious, and everyone except sour old Bee was effusive in assuring me of that, but I'm a Virgo, and was an obsessive perfectionist then, not having had these intervening years to transcend a little bit of that bullshit.  In my eyes it was a disaster and I was a failure.  I'd humiliated myself in front of my future husband.  I was scared that he would not want to marry me since I was such a lousy cook.

I was wrong about that, however.  We must have come up with our scheme to get our parents to consent to our marriage not long after that, because two weeks after Thanksgiving that year, we were married.  First, I told Mama my period was late.  It had been a few days late, and that had been scary at first.  Then when I told Ford, and we both realized that we'd have to get married, and then nobody could keep us from having sex, it stopped being scary and started feeling like a golden opportunity.

Then one day at school, before we had figured out how to break the news to our parents without getting killed for it, my period started.  I was devastated, my hopes dashed, my plans quashed.  I called Ford and he was disappointed, too.  I said, "Maybe I can just tell my mother I'm pregnant."  We talked about it for a while, and Ford told me to go for it, and he'd tell his mother, too.

When I told Mama, she cried.  She was blubbering and sniveling to Bill and he said, "I told you so."  She wanted me to finish school.  She suggested that I take some time off, maybe go stay with Granny or go to a home for unwed mothers until the baby was born, then give it up for adoption.  Then I cried.  I was in love with Ford.  He loved me, too.  We both wanted our baby.  She caved.

The plan was all worked out, both families had talked it out and we'd set a date, December 4th, when Mama found some unmistakable and undeniable  bloody evidence that I was in fact having my menstrual period right then.  Of course, she breathed a huge sigh of relief and assumed that the wedding was off.  I wasn't going to give up that easily.

There were discussions with Ford and his mother.  His step-father didn't want to get involved.  None of the three boys was his, and other than bringing home the bacon, and some discipline when their mother wasn't being effective, he preferred not to be involved in rearing them.  Ford's mother had been sixteen when he was born.  She didn't see any big problem with the idea of letting us get married.  My mother had been twenty-five when she got married and thirty-three when I was born.  She saw nothing but problems.  What about my PhD?!

My Spanish teacher even came to the house to try and persuade me not to drop out.  She had no trouble persuading my mother it was a bad idea.  Mama agreed with her all the way.  But I kept arguing and crying.  I had made up my mind.  For those brief shining days that I thought I was pregnant, my future looked bright.  I'd be June Cleaver, Harriet Nelson, or Lucy Ricardo... or all of them in one with Gracie Allen thrown in for good measure.

Finally, in one of our interminable tearful arguments, my step-father had the last word.  Bill looked disgustedly at Mama and said, "If you don't let them get married now, they'll have to get married anyway in another month or two."  Mama shut up and dried her tears, though the tears kept coming back from time to time.

I withdrew from school to get married, with everyone there assuming that I was pregnant.  The four of us: Ford and I and both our mothers, went to the courthouse and they signed for our marriage license, and Ford's mother set it up for us to go to the preacher's house for the wedding at 7 PM on Thursday, December 4, 1958.

To be continued...

I’ve been tagged: 7 Random Facts About SuSu

Gitarezan tagged me to post seven random facts/habits about myself. So, here goes.

1. I don't do randomness very well at all.  If there is a decision to be made without sufficient data, I'll flip a coin or use a more complex oracle.  Therefore, it is possible that someone might detect a pattern among these "random" facts.

2.  Generally, I don't say funny things.  I say things funny.

3.  On our honeymoon, I don't think Greyfox and I passed even one rock shop without stopping.  I remember three that were closed when we got there.  At one of them, we waited around outside until the owner came back from lunch.  At another, we got a motel room for the night and came back the next day.  The third one, in a mountain pass between Silver City and Alamogordo, New Mexico, was closed when we went by eastbound, so we stopped when we came back through a couple of days later.

4.  My most treasured possessions are rocks.  Two of the best are a blue agate geode, tumble-polished on the outside and a total mystery on the inside, which I picked up in my rootless travels right after getting out of prison and carried in my backpack all the way to Alaska; and an ancient artifact, a corestone of agatized wood from which tools or weapon points had been flaked, given to me by a fourth grader at Bayard (NM) Elementary School, after Greyfox and I had done some show and tell on our rock collection for the class.

5.  I love music... most of it.  I can't stand to listen to Baroque music, nor to a lot of the punkish or metallic stuff my son likes, such as E Nomine and Worm Quartet.  It isn't simply that I don't like listening to it.  It affects me physically and mentally; I get tense and irritable.  It's painful.   I enjoy singing but out of compassion I try not to do it when anyone else is around because I can't carry a tune with a forklift.  (...and, yes, I can operate a forklift.)  I'm a drummer and a dancer.  Rhythm and percussion are my forte, not melody.

Since each of those 5 numbered items includes at least two separate "facts", I'm stopping right there.

THE RULES:
1. People who are tagged need to share seven random facts/habits about themselves on their own blog
2. Include the rules.
3. Choose seven people to tag, include their names, and leave them a comment and tell them they've been tagged.

I am tagging:  Sue, Debi, James, Laurie, Kyle, Prissy, and Bill.  Participation is purely voluntary, and this list was the most random thing about this post (in case anyone on it resents the imposition, or someone not on it feels left out).

After 2 days and nights of rain, the number of wildfires in this valley is down by one - ten active fires here currently, 39 statewide, down from 45 yesterday.  The big one caused by lightning near here is in its sixth day, has burned 9,754 acres, has 202 firefighters working on it, and is still uncontained along its southern edge.

Down on the Kenai Peninsula, the big Caribou Hills fire, caused by sparks from a power grinder when someone was sharpening a shovel, has burned 52,000 acres, has 500 firefighters working on it, has destroyed 53 residences and 79 outbuildings, and threatens another 1600 residences.  In both areas, beetle killed spruce trees help the fires spread, igniting quickly even in wet weather.

The spruce bark beetles are an introduced species, coming here from Asia in the 1960s, I think.  I remember from an ecology class in college that the way forests "mature" from young conifer and softwood forests to old hardwood forests is through the extinction and replacement of one species after another.  Spruce is on its way out here now.

Aspen is declining, too.  The windstorm a few months ago seems to have knocked down a disproportionate number of aspens, probably weakened by bugs.  In the thirty-some years I have been here, aspen has never been as numerous as birch or poplar, and now virtually all the aspens are infested with leaf miners.  I had never seen any leaf miners here until the mid-1980s, and now they are ubiquitous. 

The affected trees are clearly evident, even from a moving vehicle on the highway, with the silver-gray mined-out leaves down below and a top-knot of new green growth -- leaves several times larger than normal -- as the trees apparently strive to produce more chlorophyll and store some sugar for winter.  The tops of beetle infested spruces show a similar crisis response, in heavy clusters of seed cones.  A healthy black spruce tapers to a point.  One with beetles is topped by a bulging mass of cones.

I don't know what species will replace the spruce and aspen, but the one that seems to be most vigorous now is poplar, the species many locals call "cottonwood" because it reproduces through long hanging catkins of the fluff that carries its seeds on the wind.  Nobody here loves the poplar.  The fluff clogs the gutters and downspouts of houses, the heater vents of cars, etc, and leaves behind spots of resin that ruin paint finishes.  The shallow roots invade gardens and displace house foundations and pavement. 

The wood rots too quickly to be useful in building cabins, and burns too poorly to make useful firewood.  Chipping it and fermenting it into biofuel has been suggested, but I haven't seen any real projects set up, just talk.  Meanwhile, I'm tending a container garden whose pots I have to lift and move around on a regular basis to keep the poplar trees from sending roots up through the drain holes to choke out my plants.  I'm gardening in containers because that is easier than fighting the tree roots to establish and maintain a garden in the ground.

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Memoir writing is complicated by what I now know and understand about what was going on with me back then.  My crazy, irrational behavior makes some sense in the light of my current understanding, but understanding the big picture does not help me remember the details.  If the story is going to have some authenticity and continuity, that must depend on my recall of events and how I felt about them at the time.  Written from my current perspective, it wouldn't be much of a story:  I was nuts and did stupid things.  I gotta try and do better than that.  I'm gonna go try and do that now.