Everyone always talks about “the love of their life.” “He was the love of my life….” Well, Duncan Buchanan was the love of her life for several years. She was sure they would end up being married at some future date. She saw him every summer at her aunt’s house.
She would come to stay a few days to visit with her Aunt and Uncle. They let her swim to her heart’s content in their back yard pool. They fed her ice cream sundaes in a fancy glass, let her try some lavender rock candy, and made her fancy tea in heirloom china cups.
They never had a daughter, so they liked to spoil their niece. Duncan lived next door and whenever she was coming to visit he would come over and question Aunt Alta, “When will she be here?” “Is she here yet?”
Duncan’s dad had old money. Although she didn’t know what that meant when she was a girl, she knew now that “old money” meant it came from the rich aristocracy of Europe, and it meant that Duncan’s dad didn’t have to work. He stayed home to paint, write, and be a dilettante.
Every summer the romance between them grew according to their ages. At first, it was just playing in the pool, tossing a beach ball back and forth, sunbathing on the hot cement deck like a couple of seals, and then rolling into the water with a loud kerplunk.
At some point they decided that it would be fun to hold their breath and look at each other under water. Then it progressed to kissing under water. Their kisses were not passionate at first. Two pubescents pressing their lips together with their eyes bulging open, holding their breath in puffed out cheeks filled with air.
The school year passed and the next summer, Kristie had learned a new trick, French kissing. She was anxious to try this new technique out on her summer boyfriend. As soon as she got to her aunt’s house, she went looking for him. She found him in the garage working on his bicycle.
She was beginning to surpass him on the development scale even though he was a year older than she. She was getting boobs and having funny feelings about boys. Duncan was surprised to see her, and suddenly a little shy. She approached him brazenly and pushed her tongue down his throat. He gasped, shocked, “What are you doing?”
“I learned how to kiss like they do in France,” she explained thinking that this was going to make her even more desirable.
“Yuck! That’s disgusting!” This was not the reaction she had hoped for.
“Hey, do you want to come over and have a swim?” She tried to change the tenor of the scene. She wanted to try the new technique under water. She thought he would have liked this new game, but he wasn’t interested. He would rather work on his bike.
That year she didn’t see him much and the following year he was sent off to boarding school… whatever that was. She never saw him again. “That kind of money doesn’t marry commoners, ” she heard her uncle say.
Maybe that was the problem, Duncan didn’t know that she was really and truly a princess, a pioneer princess, and he was just a frog.
(First published 9/26/12)
