LESSONS IN BIRDS AND BEES

My first girlfriend lived out of town in the country. She was shy because she didn't have a chance to to hang out with other kids outside of school or after-school activities. I guess there are chores, or something, on farms. So when we started dating, she'd either have to get her parents to give her a ride into town to drop her off at the mall so we could hang out or catch a movie or I would have to go all the way out to her place. When I turned 16, I could finally drive, so I'd go out to her place.

I learned that country girls grow up early with a sense of "the birds and the bees." She was totally unselfconscious about us messing around in the barn. She said that we were both going to lose our virginity, so it might as well be with each other, and might as well be now.

She'd take me to the barn and take off her clothes and help me out of mine, then show me what position she wanted first. She'd lay back on a saddle blanket with legs spread, or push me back and straddle me. Or, if our time was short, she'd pull down her jeans and present her backside to me, in an activity she liked to call "stallion and mare."

She once told me she'd found an old Playboy in the barn and had always wanted to be a Playboy model. Or a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader. She wasn't a cheerleader at school. Most of the boys never gave her a second look. But she wanted to prove to herself, or to the world, that she was just as sexy as any girl. We took her camera out once, and she posed in the pastures.

Being my first time with any of this, I didn't have any way to compare it to anything else in my life. Now, decades later, I realize just how precocious she was and how quickly my sex ed came to be.