it was tuesday morning, a little after seven. marty and i were just stirring from sleep. the house was still, the boys obviously still asleep. this was the first morning that bella was away. she was due to call in the next twenty minutes to say how her first twenty fours had gone.

as marty and i drifted from slumber and waited for bella's call, marty began recalling a time she spent a week with this same aunt. marty was twelve or thirteen. this aunt, aunt cyntha, had two daughters, rachel and melissa. rachel was a few years older than marty and melissa was several years older. both of the parents worked, one as a fireman and the other as a hair stylist. when the girls woke up in the morning, there would be a chores list on the counter. come the end of the day, if the items on that list weren't done and done well, there'd be trouble in the evening.

many years later aunt cynthia explained to marty that she was a believer in physical labor, both for chores and punishment. she felt it worked towards a tangible work ethic. her favorite punishment was to make a misbehaving child scrub a toilet with a toothbrush. one time cynthia's husband came up from the basement saying he could barely get the freezer door closed and asked if they had plans to defrost it. cynthia said there was a plan but that rachel, their youngest and more incorrigible child, was having a streak of good behavior and that the freezer would be defrosted after her next mis-step. cynthia admitted such a system required patience. fortunately she had it.

marty also remembered her cousin rachel had become interested in boys and marty not so much just yet. given her cousin's pre-occupation, their days involved biking around the community to pools and tennis courts, namely to meet girlfriends and an inevitable clot of boys. marty deflected most of the attention sent her way spending most of the time wishing the boys would stop talking to the girls so the girls could resume their games of tennis.

another, and more vivid, detail marty recalls was that she had her second ever period during this week at her aunt's. it took a day or two to work up the courage to ask her aunt for supplies. consequently she burned through her stock of underwear much faster than expected ultimately leaving her with only one pair of gangly and tattered briefs. during those days, over her hand-me-down underwear obtained from her sisters, she wore hand-me-down soccer shorts obtained from her brothers. these were the thin nylon colorful shorts that wore loose. during one of the tennis court pow-wows one of the boys looked at marty sitting on the ground and said to her derisively, "nice underwear" in reference to her ragamuffin briefs that were visible through the short's gaping leg holes. to this day the boys' sneer and tenor has stuck with marty.

the suck part of that story for me is that had i been one of the young men standing on those courts with marty, her cousin and her cousin's friends, it's unlikely anyone would have beaten me to that observation and subsequent remark about marty's ratty underwear. fortunately, i was safely hidden away three states to the west and by the time marty and i finally met, making fun of girls' underwear was long behind me, by several months at least.

oh, and bella's first day went swimmingly. so much so, it's questionable how we're going to ever pry her from in-house cable, forty horses and a deep-county farm.