Mrs. Partridge

"... What do we have to choose, then? Heaviness or lightness? This is the problem. One thing was certain: the opposition heavy-light is the most mysterious and most ambiguous of all opposition. "
Milan Kundera

     Mrs. Partridge had been the cause, in a completely unintentional way, of my first sexual arousal.

I must have been at the end of my childhood when she and her husband came to live next to our house. I met her for the first time on a Sunday afternoon, while she was unloading the moving boxes on their driveway; she greeted me with a friendly smile, and began to go back and forth carrying her things into the house.

She was a mature lady, at least to my young boy’s eyes, although with hindsight she was probably then in her thirties. She meant nothing special to me – she was  just a woman like any other, as insignificant in my life as all my mother's friends. Compared to them she was perhaps a little more meaty. Not fat, just rounded. She often wore tight jeans, with her hips so filling them to capacity that I  had to wonder how she managed to get into them.

She meant nothing special to me, that is, until one early summer afternoon I saw her sunbathing in the back yard of their home, on her back. She was lying on a lawn-chair, wearing a red bikini embroidered with flowers; she held a magazine, resting it on her slightly flexed legs, and her relaxed body was a true revelation to me. She was round, everywhere. Strong and muscular legs, a small but pronounced pot-belly, and – especially -  two huge boobs. Or at least huge to me - at the time I had never seen  a pair of breasts that big. As I watched secretly from the window of my bedroom, I wondered how it was that I hadn’t realize earlier that she was extraordinarily beautiful. She inspired ... inspired in me something, I did not know exactly what, at the time ... a kind of physical attraction, thoughts of touching her, massaging those massive thighs, feeling the texture of those soft, round arms ...

Each of us probably has a vivid memory of the first image  that caused symptoms of stiffening in our nether regions, and this was mine - Mrs. Partridge lying blissfully in the sun.