Spring Has Sprung

Spring Has Sprung

    Marsha and I lay on the yellow sandy creek beach looking at the pink glow of sunrise in the eastern sky.  She reclines on her side facing me. I am supine in the sublimity of spring. We are both twenty and too old for wading in the creek. But spring has sprung and the desire to get more than our feet wet is strong. Marsha’s irises are azure as glacial ice. Her complexion is that of French vanilla. Her hair is like fine corn silk which lusters in the summer sun. Her hair giggles when she walks.
     At St. Catherine Creek the water appears on fire and sparkles in the early morning sunlight. The red clay bluffs, which tower over the opposite bank, are suffused with rosy pastel dawn light.
     Puffs of mist slowly roll across the water which trickles over pebbles. The forest around the creek is alive with the chirping of crickets and tree frogs.
     We bare it all for the sake of starched shirt humanity in the hopes that one day they may join us. She says, “Our pairing off affords a wider range
of recreation than a conventional nudist colony.”
She plucks a clump of field horsetail and briskly brushes my back to the seat of my absent swim trunks. This sends my tender skin into a baptismal sun of smolder. She says, “This exfoliates your dry skin. Why go to a spa when you have me?”
     She continues, “Care for a cough drop?” I pop her offering into my mouth.
     “My favorite flavor, orange.”
     She grabs me by the hair and makes love to my mouth with her tongue. She asks, “How did that feel for you?”
     “When you penetrated my mouth with your tangy tongue your taste splashed into me like freshly squeezed satsumas.”
     “Now, let’s suck on the lemon cough drops from my purse. Kiss me you fool! Now, how did that feel?”  
     I say, “You felt creamy and citrusy like my first taste of lemon meringue pie.”
     “With homemade lemon custard made from scratch,” she asserts. “Your kiss tasted like rainbow sherbet melting in my mouth” she attests.
     Cicadas sing while she sucks on Red Hots candy pieces from her purse. When she kisses me her tongue is laced with the fire of a feminine arson.
      I say to her, “Tell me where the hand of God is in this merciless world.” Her answer is to bestride me with the strength of a lion but the gentleness of a lamb. Her muscles are sinewy as a puma but her skin as soft as a newly blossomed magnolia petal. There is a Florida freedom in her eyes where her Pensacola of the heart becomes a spring break paradise. My heart longs to hole up in a condo with her by the beach far from the maddening crowd. But this swath of sand is our Santa Rosa Island. And here we contend like ancient Greek wrestlers. But instead of a spotless lyceum floor, our arena is a mud-caked creek bed where nature holds sway to our delight.
     We wade barefoot through the cool water. We sit on the submerged creek bed. Marsha’s legs are parted in a weir. The flow makes her Venus-plats quake like aspen. I give her a hand up.
     “Did you hear the song of the mockingbird from the shrubbery as he celebrated our joy with us?”
     “Pray tell, how did you know it was a male?”
     “You silly man. Males sing more frequently and with a much wider variety of vocals. In fact, this one mimicked me when my voice reached cruising altitude and switched over to autopilot. Maybe he was courting me? Tell me plainly do you think the mimicker’s purpose was to mock me or woo me?”
    “If I were he my intentions would be the latter, but enough of this avian chatter.”
    “Your eyes are turning green with envy.”
     When Marsha does her yoga it becomes readily apparent that her body intrigues me like one of those perfect Pythagorean forms must have intrigued the ancient Greeks.
     Marsha does her stretching and breathing exercises. She tells me, “Never push your body hard in yoga. That will only give you a pulled muscle. Give your body time to become supple. Remember yoga makes life easier for yourself and those around you. I can greet the sun with my yoga squats in my birthday suit to simultaneously perk you up for the day and tone my body which is a gift to us both.”
     I say, “Your stances are better than coffee to start my day.”
     I give her a hand up. We face each other sharing sassafras smiles. I grab a chunk of wet red clay and paint her face in stripes. I squeeze her bird-delicate shoulders. Her eyes close to mystic rosebuds. Her body quivers, under my touch, like a wild doe in the presence of humans. Thus I finger-paint her bare breasts with frescos of fiery suns radiating from her nipples.
     Marsha smiles like dawn on the first morning. Birds sing her praise like a choir of angels. We join hands in a circle of life and dance in rings of love’s sweet delight. “Hey yah. Hey, yah” we chant under the bowl of sky. Then our lips meet with a rosy fire. Our bare feet sink into the wet clay making love to the earth. We settle into the unbroken chain.
     I say, “Have you ever had to refrain from something you really enjoyed for the sake of not getting caught?”
     “When I was in high school my girlfriends and I were part of a secret society of Wiccan practitioners. One day my little sister noticed I had a pentagram tattoo on my thigh. She also told Mom that I had a voodoo doll. It was a pin cushion for goodness sakes! She told Mom that I was practicing voodoo, Mom told my priest, and the hullabaloo began. I explained to Mom that the pincushion was for my home education class where I was learning to do alterations. Mom said ‘Your grandmother would be proud to know you are learning to sew. It is a tradition for the women of our family.’ Mom explained the misunderstanding to Father Michael and he answered that Wiccan was a lesser blasphemy than voodoo. However, in his book, it was still witchcraft. So my penance was abstinence from my witchy ways and no pizza for a month.”
     I say, “What if we refrained from naked romps in the woods for a while?”
     She replies, “This has been on my mind too. We’ve been lucky not to get in trouble out here. But I have something in mind which will restore our freedom. The key is to migrate. The south isn’t very open to naked folks gallivanting around naked as jaybirds. We need to head west.”
     “You are a better orienteer through the pine barrens of life than me. So if your compass needle points us west, I follow.”
     “John, the park ranger is coming out of the woods. My Mom would be mortified if he reported my indecent exposure, made all the worse by being with a naked man. John, he will be here any minute.
What do we do now?”
     I instruct, “Well, let me do the talking when he arrives. You get hysterical in these situations which is typical of women.”
     “Sometimes I think sexism and chivalry are one and the same. Please defer to the fairer sex in this matter.”
     “Oh, Mr. Park Ranger we just had to whiz. We thought we were alone here,” she says.
    The ranger says, “I never expected to be mooned out here. An elderly couple just pulled in with a bumper sticker saying, ‘Jesus saves.’ You folks were lucky.”    
     Marsha says, “I’m sorry you had to witness this sordid affair. I promise you, good sir, never to treat this nature preserve as a nudist colony again.” She bites her bottom lip and laughs in hiccups.