we all love Tami

This is Part 6 of “The Girl in the Mirror”. Tami found herself out of place, a naked person in a clothed world. This post is out of place, a December segment in August. Here she is back with her family in Rhode Island on the holiday break, after her traumatic first semester as a (forced to be naked all the time) Freshman at Campbell-Frank College in Vermont.

They came drifting in like a dream to the sleeping girl.  Christmas carols played by Salvation Army style horns.  She opened her eyes and her room was magically brighter than usual.  A quick glance up told her why.  The back yard was a soft, silent heaven of white stuff.  Big wet flakes were coming down from the white sky.  The white stuff covered the ground, shrouded the branches, thatched the roofs of the garage and the nearby houses and the girl realized that this was the morning of Christmas Eve, the time of year she had been looking forward to for months.

Soon she would run down to the tree to see wrapped gifts that Santa had brought her, to be opened tonight, and Grandma and Grandpa would be there to give her lollipops, and Mommy would suit her up in her snowpants and she’d go out and build a snowman with Joey and Daddy, with branches stuck in its sides for arms . . .

With her first full awake breath Tami realized that she was no longer eight years old.  She was no longer in a little kid’s world.  Grandma and Grandpa were dead.  Those would be no toys under the tree.  A tear rolled from her eye.

She sniffled and cleared her throat and sat up, blankets wrapped around her shoulders, looking out at the snowy wonderland.  She took a deep breath, listening to the Christmas carols.  Yes, she was a grownup now.  Being grownup was better, in general.  You had more control of things.  Still, there were so many nice memories which should be held onto.

She glanced quickly down and ruefully acknowledged her nakedness.  Well, I might be a grownup but I’m a naked grownup.  In one important way I don’t have control of my life at all.

She looked over to her old broken clock radio, a Christmas gift from ten years ago.  7:15 a.m.  It had gone off unexpectedly to play her Christmas carols, like a kind angel from the past.  She felt like it was giving her a sign.  Was this still a dream?  No.

Outside the snow was about four inches deep.  Tami looked closer.  At points there was bare ground where it had not stuck.  This snow was not going to last.  If it was melting already, it will melt all the more quickly later in the day as the temperature rises.  Melt away like her childhood.

It was a crazy thought.  Tami fought against it.  It was ridiculous.  But yet . . . it was not that cold out.  This was do-able.  There would be no snow pants, no Joey (at least as she knew him).  But she was going to make a snowman.  The radio was calling her to do it.  And there wasn’t much time.

The naked girl threw off her blankets and decided she was not going to turn back.  She tiptoed downstairs, slowly opened the back door, then the storm door, and walked upright into the still, cold air and the unbelievably cold feeling of snow which stuck wet and feathery to her bare feet.

Like a swimmer who knows the best way to get used to cold water is to dive in all at once, Tami fell forward on her face, letting the snow crunch into her breasts, her tummy, her legs . . . then she rolled over, feeling it on her back, wedging into the crack of her butt . . . deliberately freezing herself . . . and when she got up the air was not so cold.

She went to work.  Rolling snowballs that grew as she pushed them across the yard, the crunching from her bare feet and from the snowballs echoing in the cold silence, within five minutes she had hefted one snowy boulder on top of the other with strong wide-spread arms against her hard, flushed, pointy breasts and flat tummy until she had a snowman as tall as she was (and much fatter).  The falling snow matted her hair, and there was more snow packed into to her pubic bush and melting all over in little rivers down her red, flushed skin.  She imagined little Naked Tami, eight years old, playing in the snow with the other kids, a lifetime of never having worn clothes except for at the beginning with diapers . . . Could such a thing be possible?  In just four months she had already developed resistance to cold which amazed her.  Maybe after eight years of being exposed to the outdoors she would have been a healthy, rugged, ruddy-skinned child free of any sense of modesty.  Part of her wished she had been indeed naked since birth.  The hard part was not the nudity but her feelings of shame.

She stuck branches in the snowman’s sides, said a gentle “Merry Christmas” to the snowman and to Joey and Mommy and Daddy and her grandparents and to her childhood, and then rushed back into the house and under the covers where it was quiet and warm.