Author:
Sean
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Date Posted: 15:37:07 01/29/26 Thu
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\The humid air of 1973 hung heavy in Nana’s Florida room, where the only relief came from the steady vibrateing of a heavy metal floor fan. Sarah’s mom was real intentional about how she raised her son, believeing he should stay bare all summer to keep from sweltering in the heat. Back then, until about the mid-70s, it wasn't even that weird in the rural parts of the state; plenty of folks thought it was just more natural for boys to be "free" while they were still kids. Since I was a guest, both Amy and I followed the house rules without a second thought. That night, the four of us—me at ten, Sarah at nine, her seven-year-old brother, and our neighbor Amy—sprawled out on the orange shag carpet. Me, Sarah, and her brother were completely nude, while Amy stayed in her white cotton panties. We drifted off to the sound of crickets and the sharp scent of mosquitoe coils, just a tangle of tan limbs catching the breeze from the fan.
When the sun started burning through the morning mist, we prepped for the trek to the coast. Following the house code for the summer heat, Sarah's brother and I stayed bare for the ride, while the girls decided to cover up for the trip. Sarah zipped into her denim jumper and Amy pulled on a simple sun-dress over her panties. We grabbed our faded beach towels and draped them over the hot vinyl banana seats of our Sting-Rays, knowing the sun would of blistered our skin the second we sat down. We pedaled out in a loose, wild pack, our tires crunching over the lime-rock roads and throwing up clouds of white dust. The only nervous part was when the sandy trail met the two-lane highway. We didn't stop to think; we just checked for cars and raced across the blacktop as fast as we could, the wind hitting our bare skin before we dived back into the safety of the scrub on the other side.
Just as we reached the dunes, the trail turned into deep, soft sand that forced us off our bikes. That was when the sandspurs got us. I spent five minuts balanced on one leg, bare and wincing, as I picked those nasty, barbed burrs out of my heels while Sarah and Amy laughed at my struggle. Once we cleared the stickers, we rolled up to a secluded stretch of sand where the sea oats gripped the dunes and the Atlantic rolled in steady and warm. A few fishermen were scattered along the shoreline with there long surf rods propped in pipes, but in this rural pocket, they didn’t even turn there heads as our pack arrived.
As soon as the bikes were dropped, the girls shed there clothes in seconds, leaving the jumper and the dress in a heap by the tires. While we were hitting the waves, a few other local kids we knew—Jimmy and his younger brother—spotted us from the next dune over. They were beach rats, wearing nothing but frayed denim cut-offs. They jogged over, there hair bleached white by the salt and sun, and greeted us like we were all part of the same tribe. There was no awkwardness about us being bare; they just dropped there cut-offs by our bikes and jumped into the surf with us. After a while, Sarah pulled a bright orange Frisbee out of her bike basket. I was being lazy, just sitting in the wet sand watching the ghost crabs, and the warm sun had me feeling a bit too relaxed. Sarah noticed I had an awkward erection and, with the other kids watching, decided it was the perfect excuse to tease me. She ran over, laughing, and gave it a playful, firm tug to get me on my feet. "You're not just sitting there all day," she joked while Jimmy and the others cracked up. I scrambled up, red-faced but laughing, and the six of us spent the next hour as a wild, tan-skinned pack, chasing that orange disc through the surf.
Around noon, the low rumble of Nana’s wood-paneled station wagon announced lunch. She backed the car right up to the edge of the scrub and dropped the tailgate, joined by Sarah’s mom. Both moms stayed in there simple cotton sundresses all day, looking cool and comfortable in the shade. We all gathered around the back of the wagon, the four of us bare and sandy as we dried off in the salt air. We worked through baloney sandwiches on white bread and drank Grape Nehi from glass bottles that were still sweating from the cooler ice.
As the sun started to dip, the air got thick with that heavy smell of salt spray and rotting seagrass that always hung over the dunes. You could smell the Coppertone too, that sweet coconut scent Sarah's mom had rubbed on us even though we were mostly tan anyway. We loaded the bikes back up, our skin feeling tight and itchy from the dried salt. As we pedaled back through the scrub, the mosquitoes were just starting to wake up in the tall grass, and that smell of the ocean followed us all the way home. In that rural stretch of Florida, being natural wasn’t a choice we made; it was just the way the summer belonged to us.
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