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Tuesday, 27 November 2007

An Old Woman's Peculiar Pleasure

By Jessie Landis

As I run the soapy sponge over that place on my lower left shin, a pinprick of exquisite pleasure bursts forth at its matching spot on my upper back. I no longer question it, no longer wonder what tangle of mixed-up neuronal messages causes it and I no longer remember how many decades ago I first discovered the phenomenon. I count on it now and hope it never goes away.

Although, in the normal course of my days, it doesn’t occur to me to think about showering, when I step into the spray each morning, there is a familiar rush of anticipation at the routine I have refined in the half century since I first realized the ecstasy to be found in cleaning my body.

The water temperature must be right – hot. I like it steaming. So much so that no man in my past could tolerate it and I shiver at anything cooler. For this reason, I dispatched romantic showers from my sexual repertoire early in my adult life.

First I wash my face with a cleanser I keep in the caddy only for that purpose. It’s nothing special or pricey – you can get it at Rite-Aid – but it is a perfect blend of creaminess and astringency to take off the dead skin cells that somehow accumulate from nothing more than sleeping.

Next, I soap the sponge – a real, dead-animal sponge from the ocean that, similar to my facial cleanser, is just rough enough to scrape off the dirt but not too scratchy like those loofahs are.

I start with my arms, moving upward from hands to shoulders, neck and upper chest. There are lots of suds from the sponge that wash away with the hot spray of water as I scrub. These days, I must hold up my small breasts to wash under them which wasn’t so when they – and I - were young and perky. But I don’t mind. Better to be 75 than dead yet.

As I do every day I notice, as I move the sponge toward my nether regions, that my belly pooches out now where it was once flat and taut. I don’t mind that either. I despised crunches all my life and gave them up some years ago when I decided I was old enough, at last, to do more of what I like and less of what I don't. But because I don’t own a full-length mirror, I have no idea if my pubic hair is as gray as the hair on my head. Last time I looked, two or three years ago, it was not.

By now, the sponge needs re-soaping and then I skip to my feet and legs knowing it's coming up, that spot on my left shin. Postponing the event, I wash my right leg first. Then, with my left foot propped on the end of the tub and my back positioned nicely for the rat-a-tat-tat of the falling water on that special place, I move the sponge up from my foot – oh, yes! – again today as every day, that pinprick of pleasure.

It is similar to a needle pressed into the skin of my back, but without the pain. I stop washing now to not jostle the feeling as an immense relaxation radiates from the point on my back down through my buttocks to my thighs and up to my shoulders.

The intense pleasure is short-lived, 20 seconds or so, before it subsides and I am left with an extraordinary sense of well-being and calm. In case you are wondering, from such a description – no, it is nothing like orgasm. Equal in heightened sensitivity, yes, but entirely different, private and inexplicable. It happens only when I touch that place on my leg.

The rest of my shower – the remaining body parts and hair washing - goes more slowly as I luxuriate in the hot water falling on my now super-sensitized skin.

And then I am ready for the day.

For almost as long as I have lived, I have enjoyed my peculiar sense anomaly, but it has taken on greater importance, in old age, to my well-being. Having lived alone now for many years, I rarely feel the life-enhancing power of another person’s skin on mine. Sexual encounters are behind me and anyway, that’s not what I mean. I could approximate the touch of a loved one with massages, but they are beyond my meager budget. So I bless the mixed-up neurons that give me this extraordinary daily pleasure.

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