MY LEGS AND ME - A Coming of Age Story

I was twelve years old and we were visiting my grandfather's farm in West Virginia. My aunt and her children from Baltimore had joined us.

My brother, my cousin, and I had spent the weekend the way we characteristically did in those years. We caught salamanders down by the stream and raced them around the huge wraparound porch. In the barn, hiding from the hot sun, we would jump from the hayloft down at least one story into great big piles of hay, rolling and rolling and laughing. We scaled trees to see who could climb the highest. I always won. I was much smaller and lighter, so I could sit on the very thinnest of branches.

Late Sunday afternoon as we were leaving to go home, my sixteen-year-old cousin Richard, walked me to the car. Sliding into the seat, I raised my face for his customary kiss on the cheek, but this time he whispered, "You've got great legs, Jacquie." I drew back, but before I could ask the question, the car door closed. Winking, he turned away. I looked down at the legs sticking out of a pair of homemade pumpkin-colored shorts that looked as though they had been fashioned from an orange gunny-sack.

What does that mean? What are "great" legs? These are just the same old legs I've always had. I was a little sprout, and able to stretch those appendages full length in front of me in our Desoto without even touching the back of the front seat. I looked at them intently. What was the secret thing that made them great?

They were the same legs that straddled a horse bareback and rode through the meadows with the wind tickling my naked feet as it whooshed between my toes; that ran the length of a makeshift football field my Dad had fashioned in our backyard, by means of a grass seed spreader and lime...only usable until it rained. The limbs stretched before me were the same ones that I wrapped around my father's waist as he galloped through the house holding me piggyback both of us laughing conspiratorially, as my mother shouted "Take it outside you two...no running in the house." Somewhere in that five hour drive, and after a reasonably long nap, I managed to forget about my legs entirely.

It took four long years-between the ages of twelve and sixteen-for my parents to cajole me into being a girl. I absolutely never thought about my legs unless one had to be tended for injury. I ran track with them kicking up clouds of cinders behind me, swam with them propelling me forward, and dove from

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