Pandemic Pits: A Love Story
How I learned to let it grow
W e were very young when we first met. I was eleven, maybe twelve. It seemed they had only just entered the world. Back then, I was enamored by their delicate, sprouting innocence — almost translucent in their infancy. They made me feel that I was truly becoming a woman, an entity with broiling passions and urges I didn’t understand. I often found my fingers weaving through them during class, cheeks burning hot when the teacher looked my way and shook me out of the haze. They were a diverting fascination and a source of comfort when I needed it most.
But before we really got to know each other, there came the shame. The girls in the locker room who wore lacy thongs and underwire bras didn’t have them. Nor did my lady teacher or Jamie Lynn Spears. Nor my mother, whose intimate life I was most familiar with. Had she ever had them at all? It seemed the only women who chose to keep their company were the ones I’d seen in Woodstock footage straddling shirtless, mud-caked men’s shoulders, arms outstretched in reckless euphoria. I found their middle-parted locks and unfocused eyes unnerving.
Whenever I saw a girl with unshaved underarms, I was taken aback by the dark matter hidden beneath — as if it was something private and…
