A Cotton Dress

Every year, June 22nd, she comes back to the park. This was her fifth year. She always wears the same thing--a cotton dress, sandals. Her hair, undone and loose, the waves cascading down her shoulder blades, caressing her skin, just a hint of sweat.

Everything just the same as it was the day she saw Rowan. Five years ago now, hard to believe. She was younger then, just a few years out of college. Back then, nearly every day she wore a cotton dress and sandals. It was pretty much her uniform.

Five years ago, the day had come to her as a gift--all her work appointments cancelled, no friends around. She was free to do what she wished, whatever came to mind.

So of course she went to Meridian Hill. Her favorite park, because of the encounter so long ago with her mystery man. Meredian Hill was elevated on a mesa, on the outskirts of town. The park was all stunning vistas, wide open sky. It was her place to feel free, the only place she could imagine what the mystics felt--free and held, all at once.

She could look down on the city--and see there the naked ambition, all the fear and anxiety, the rush and the mayhem. One car, after another, one office, after another. In this park, here in her "happy place," she felt none of it. Down in the city, she knew, was her real life and her future, and the place where she felt most alive, where she felt vital. But up here on Meredian Hill she felt herself an old soul, secure, with a place in the universe all her own, completely comfortable in her skin.

As it was her day and hers alone, she wore nothing under her dress.

Alone and buoyant, she jumped on the swing and sang the first song that came in to her head: Papa was a rolling stone/Wherever he lay his hat was his home.

On and on, she sang. Her voice rising, the only sound around.

She swung higher and higher. The hem of her dress flying open. The breeze caressing her wide open legs, wreaking havoc on her ability to remember the words. She did not much care, as it turns out. It was not just the summer breeze. She suddenly noticed that the swing was rubbing her ass in such a way that her breath caught. The blue sky and the sun added to her overall sense of feeling good and right. Without quite realizing it she shifted in the swing so that her breath came up short again. And again. There was some part of the wood that caught her in places that had been touched rarely.

Her last boyfriend--in college--had explored her ass with his tongue. She loved it but for no good reason she started laughing and he never did that again. Now, with the insistent swing finding that same tender spot, she was reminded of how much she longed for someone to help her explore, learn more, touch her ass and find out how far she would go.

At any moment she might have an orgasm. She stopped singing and was concentrating, her teeth digging into the flesh of her lower lip.

Then she heard it.

Off in the woods, on a bench she had never seen, or at least never noticed, and truth be told she's never seen again, though every June 22nd she looks, there was a man, strumming a guitar. He was looking at her, intermittently, but mostly just eyeing his guitar. She shifted her ass on the swing again, this time with intent. She was desperate now to come.

With effort, she could make out the words he was singing:

A summer wind, a cotton dress

This is how I remember you best

A glance held long and a stolen kiss

This is how I remember you best

She thought he would come over, especially as her breathing was crooked now--and labored--and she thought he must be able to see the dampness showing on her dress. She knew he had seen her put her hand down her dress, and rub her breast, tug at her nipple. At any moment, she expected him to put his hand on the swing and send her higher.

But in that moment, when she bunched up her dress, and put her fingers on her hot wet flesh and without hesitation began to cry out, she looked over, into the woods, and there was nothing. No man--though she had known his name upon looking at him, no bench. No guitar.

She thinks maybe one day he will be there, her Rowan. Though the memory is lessened with each passing year. She will not get rid of the white cotton dress, though she wears it only once a year now. The dress reminds her. It smells, even now, of wonder and awe, and beginnings, and pure unadulterated freedom, which is to say, joy.