Over the years men had watched her grow up, licking their lips as she took her walks. She felt their greedy eyes run over her body as if she were a fattening calf. Brushing her hair from her eyes, raising her chin she would stare at them. But the gesture exposed her heart shaped face and the ruddy colour of her cheeks which would flare with colour if her passion was stirred and contrasted with her wild hair a blend of shades, russet and gold reflecting Autumn leaves and Summer corn fields like a mottled amber emblematic of her personality.
She proceeded through life with a directness that startled those who did not know her. She had never been one to accept life meekly.
Declare not what you are, not what you have to be, but what you want to be.’
She loves being a woman but her idea of being a woman was quite different from most of her friends and indeed probably that of most people she knew.
Her idea of being a woman required a man but not a man to offer security. She could be a person all by herself. She could be an adult all by herself. But she wanted to be a woman for real and to be that she needed a man to make love to her.
Only then did she feel most clearly alive and most clearly herself. She felt she could then walk across the floor of her life with an easy grace and with love enough to live on at the centre of herself.
That was her greatest desire, her goal.
She was a woman who delighted in intimacy with a man, not fears it. She loved to be touched emotionally and physically. She was ahead of her time, perhaps outside of her time.
She learned early on never to challenge life to a game because life plays dirty, changes the rules, steals the cards out of your hand and sometimes turns them all blank. She also learned about the colours of the human heart and the colours of the soul. She sees them clearly because she can look beyond the clutter of what others see. She knows that some people cannot be helped, and some people leave a trail behind them that poisons everyone who crosses it. The father was such a man, but the wind has taken him now. The wind will always take its due.
Poured into her dress like spun sugar and egg white she saw the sorrow written in men’s faces lighten as she passed by on her customary evening stroll. She offers many temptations, of the flesh, vanity in dress and in manner, fine clothes oh, they are tempting indeed. But most men she meets are full of bluster and empty display as the peacocks that roam. Yet her calling, she felt, was not to use or abuse them but to make a difference, to change their sad, unhappy lives even for just a moment to bring a smile to their countenance.