I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.
My other cousin, Rita Elizabeth, had snuck up on us. Very quiet for all that she's a big girl, well, a big woman by then. She was named after her mother and grandmother. If she had been a man she'd have been called Rita the Third, Rita III, or something like that. As it was, Margie and Bevvy greeted her with, "we didn't exactly try to hide anything, R.E. (they pronounced it Are EE). And you're here now, join us."
I was looking up, kind of speechless, overwhelmed by this next new development.
R.E. is a couple of years older than Bevvy. I guess she was 23 or 24 that summer. And as I looked up she was obviously and hugely pregnant. I watched, fascinated, captivated, unable to look away, as she did the crossed arms across her front thing and peeled her T-shirt off
She was huge. Her belly stuck out like she was ready to give birth to a third grader. It was a mass of stretchmarks, very dark brown, and, for some reason, very sexy to me. As I watched, a very distinct bulge started high on the left side of her belly, just below her rib cage, and slowly moved down to her hip.
She giggled and touched where the bulge was starting to recede and said, "my little soccer player is getting his exercise today."
"So," Bevvy said, giggling a little and touching that same spot, "if you actually go into labor, what do we need to do."
R.E. laughed and said, "Well, getting me to a hospital in town would be nice but, well, the soccer star will get out, regardless."
She reached under that immense belly and I watched as she unbuttoned and unzipped her cutoffs and then pushed them down along with the panties, what I would later learn to call "granny panties" and I had the fleeting thought, "how many yards of cloth went into those."
She smiled at me then, not a grin, but a real, happy-to-see-you smile.
"It's okay to look, Davey," she said, and did a slow turn.
R.E. is a plain woman. She's not ugly or homely, but she's the very definition of "plain." First, she's big. At 5'9" she's tall for a woman. At about 200 pounds she's big. Not obese or anything, but big. Thick. She's "matronly," with big boobs, no waist, and a big ass. Thick thighs. Her most "feminine" feature is the relatively delicate calves under those oversize thighs. And oddly small feet.
But on that day, looking ready for her water to break, she was Earth Mother incarnate.
Years later, taking some anthropology course while I was working toward my Master's Degree in history, I ran across an image of an Earth Goddess statuette that had been excavated in some obscure dig or other. The Venus of Willendorf figure is estimated to be something like 25,000 years old, predating the Neolithic Revolution. As soon as I saw that little statuette my mind flashed back to that day by the little not-quite-a-lake in eastern Colorado.
She giggled as I stared.
"If you like this," she said, her hands rubbing and then lifting her immense belly, "you're going to love these," and she used her thumbs and forefingers to work her nipples until a few thick white drops were expressed (another word I wouldn't learn until much later).
