My meditations lately had settled upon the female form, the gentle curve of the breast, the roundness of the hip flowing into the buttock. My sensei would say that I was allowing my body to direct my meditation. I personally would say that I was horny. That was my dilemma.
I had moved to the north woods because I was too caught up in the material things of this world and I had worked hard to quell those desires. Unfortunately, I had brought my body with me, and it had its own agenda.
She pulled up in a nondescript SUV on a cool August morning as robins hopped about the lawn and a woodpecker hammered from a white pine.
Perhaps she was the vanguard of a family getting ready to spend a few weeks in the north woods. I watched from my gazebo.
The opening windows traced her path from front to back through her house. She emerged from the rear door with an armful of blankets that she threw over a clothesline to air out. The slender brunette intended to stay there a while with or without company.
I tried to resume my meditation, but the spell had been broken. I am still at the shallow end of the meditation pool.
My solitary life was going to change. I would have to wear clothing when I stepped outside.
My home faced my neighbor's home fifty yards away across an inlet off a small lake. No other cabins sat around that lake because it is part of the Huron National Forest, and there is nothing but white pine and cedar swamp. For the past year, I had been the only soul except for the occasional fisherman who launched his canoe and paddled around the lake casting for pike. Even he did not enter the inlet where my house and the other sat.
The day passed as it normally did. The laughing call of the loons floated from across the lake, and cicadas buzzed high up in the trees.
My new neighbor frequently walked outside to talk on her cell phone. Her reception was as bad as mine. She waved to me in the afternoon when she wandered down to the water's edge. I waved back unsure if she could tell I was naked on my patio.
That evening as shadows deepened into night, the woman screamed for help from the cedar swamp. I knew immediately what had happened, as I raced across my lawn to the dense stand of cedars where the inlet's water flowed into a swamp that drained into Lower Turtle Lake.
Dodging low branches and blackberry canes, I pushed into the forbidding darkness.
"Where are you?" I called into the gloom.
"Follow my voice and please hurry. I'm sinking," the urgency in her voice hovered on the edge of panic.
I spied her through a tangle of dead branches. She had fallen into the slough that had nearly claimed me a couple weeks before, and was fighting to get out of the waist deep muck. During the dry summer, the mud crusted over that seep and sparse grass grew in the leaf litter that fell onto it. It looked like firm ground until you stepped on it and fell into mud the consistency of oatmeal that was so cold it took your breath away.
I pushed through the dead branches and knelt down on the last bit of firm ground.
"Can you reach my hand?"
She shook her head. "Please hurry. I keep sinking lower."
"I'll be right back."
I walked back into the woods and found a dead sapling that was still standing. I pushed it over and then dragged it to the pool and slid it out to her. "Grab this, and I'll pull you closer."
She gripped it for dear life, but it slid through her hands when I pulled.
"The suction of the mud was too strong," panic shrilled her voice.
"All right, I'm coming in."
I waded into the muck shuddering as the spring fed water chilled me. I held onto the sapling with one hand and extended my other to her. "Grab my hand."
She did and I slowly tugged her to me against the resistance of the clinging mud. While I was supporting my weight and hers, the sapling slipped a little further into the muck, but it held for now. We needed to get out of this before this quagmire trapped both of us.
"I'm going to push you onto solid ground."
I grabbed her by the waist and in stages moved her along the sapling closer to the shore. "I've got a toehold on a root. Get ready, I'm going to hoist you onto firm ground."
I slid my arm between her legs up to my elbow, and lifted her with all my might throwing her toward the tangled roots of a cedar. She lay panting on ground barely firm enough to hold her.
"Now grab those roots in front of you and use it to pull your legs out of the muck."
"I can't," she gasped, "I'm afraid I'll slide back in if I move."
"Wait a minute." I pulled myself closer to the shore until my head was squarely between her legs. I leaned my head into her mud covered crotch and braced her ass against my forehead.
"Okay, grab that bush. I'll keep you from sliding back."
She gasped when she slid back, but I braced her with my face, and with a little work, she managed to crawl away from the swamp's edge.
"How are you going to get out? I can't pull you out." She sat on the roots of a cedar tree covered in a muck that refused to be wiped off.
I pointed to the sapling. "I want you to stand on it, and try to anchor it to the ground while I work myself out."
She did and a few minutes later I lay gasping at the edge of the muck covered from chest down in thick clinging mud.
She sat down next to me laughing. "That's a hell of a way to meet your new neighbor by having him shove his head up your ass." She wiped mud off her face. "It looked like solid ground. I thought I was going to die. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. I need to catch my breath."
"I came over to see if you knew how to start my well pump. Every time I turn it on, it kicks off again. I was going to drive over, but it looked like I had to go five miles around the lake to get to your house. Then I saw the woods and thought I'd cut through." She looked down at her clothes. "Now look at me."
I stood. "Let's go down by the water, and wash this mud off."
She cocked an eyebrow at me. "You want me to take off my clothes in front of you?"
"What else are you going to do? You have no water at your house, and I don't want all that mud dragged into my house. Rinse yourself off, and then you can take a shower at my house. I'll give you a bathrobe to wear."
She followed me down to the water in the gathering gloom. I waded in and submerged myself scrubbing to get the mud off me. She waded in a modest ten yards away, and scraped at the mud on her blouse without taking it off.
"This isn't working," she muttered.
She waded deeper. I thought she was going to swim back to her house, but she stopped when the water was up to her shoulders, removed her blouse and wrung it.
"My blouse is still too muddy to wear. Every time I wring it out, I get more mud."
With a mumbled curse, she threw the wadded blouse up onto the bank.
"I think I'll just dog paddle my way back to my house, and I'll pick up my blouse tomorrow."
"You don't have water, how are you going to get clean?"
That stopped her.
"Come up to my house. You can take a warm shower, and then I can take you home with some water so you can brew coffee in the morning."
"Let me see what I can do with these pants."
I watched her bob back and forth struggling to get out of her pants in the water. When the white pants floated to the surface she eyed them critically. "They're worse than my top." She cursed under her breath, and threw them onto the shore too.
"I think I will accept your kind offer," she sighed with a touch of resignation in her voice.
With that she waded out of the water wearing a mud stained bra and pantie set.
"I don't even know your name, and now you see me in all my glory." She curtsied.
She was tall and had a nice trim figure. I estimated she was in her late thirties or early forties. The muscle tone in the arms and legs told me that she spent time in the gym. She had taken care of herself over the years.
I waded out of the water.
She put her hand to her mouth. "You're naked!"
I nodded. "I've been since you called for help." I held out my hand. "Hi, neighbor. My name is Dave."
She gave me a firm hand shake while riveting her eyes to mine. "I'm Loren. Were you in the shower when you heard me calling?"
"Not exactly, but we can talk about that when we get to the house."
I led her into the house and showed her where the bathroom was. She pretended not to peek at me, but her eyes wandered over my body when she thought I wasn't looking.
When the bathroom door closed, I grabbed a bar of soap, a towel and headed back down the lawn to the water where I washed myself as thoroughly as I could in the near total darkness, dried myself, and finally threw Loren's clothes over a line to dry.
When she opened the door to the bathroom looking undersized in my bathrobe, she stopped. "You're still naked?"
I smiled up at her from the table where I was sitting. "It's what I wear around the house."
She cocked her head. "You're a nudist?"
"I guess. I never really thought about it."
If she was going to bolt, it would be now. Instead, she walked over to the table and sat across from me being careful that her bathrobe did not gap out when she leaned forward to sit. Her fatigue was visible in her face.
Her combed out, but still wet chestnut hair touched her shoulders. She had a pleasant face that looked radiant when she smiled. I really noticed her green eyes, her slightly turned up nose, and full lips. I had scored pretty high in the good looking neighbor category.
"Why don't you wear clothes?"
I shrugged. "I spent years as the owner of an engineering firm that designed paint shops for car companies. The last few years have been tough. First I lost my wife of thirty years, and I just didn't want to work anymore. I had built my career for the 'us' that no longer existed. I sold the business to a competitor, and moved up here. I needed to get away from the constant reminders of what I had lost."
I watched myself babble away, and couldn't stop it. Perhaps I'd been away from people too long. If I was serving up too much information, she didn't show it. I rattled on.
