Last week, I wrote a piece about growing old, and I mentioned that many young people don’t believe that older people want to have sex or do have sex. And older people are too busy talking about their pills and health care to talk much about sex. The very idea is considered creepy to many people. I said I do want to have sex, as often as possible even though I rarely talk about it, since I grew up in Puritan New England where sex talk is discouraged, even punished. Today, the Gulleys came over to the farm to pick up the art work they didn’t sell at the Open House (there wasn’t much left) and Carol came out of her truck wagging her finger at me.

I thought I was in trouble.

Carol and Maria were having a great time, smirking and laughing and wagging their fingers at me.

“You,” Carol said, “you’ve caused me a lot of trouble writing what you did about sex.” Her husband Ed was laughing and smirking, Maria cracked up.  I explained to the Gulleys that sex was absent from my life for a very long time before I met Maria. I was pretty closed up – very closed up. My farm was like a moat around my life, nobody much ever got to enter.

I kept telling Maria that I didn’t like to be touched much, I didn’t like massages or even foot rubs. This was a bit of  conceit of mine, this idea that I didn’t wish to be touched. It wasn’t even true, I was just terrified of being touched, for all sorts of ugly and complex reasons. I missed being touched, my body and soul were hungry, love-starved.

When I started hanging out with Maria, it was made clear to me that she wasn’t about to get involved with anybody who didn’t wish to be touched, she had experienced some of that, and she wasn’t buying it again. I knew I had to do something different. I don’t remember much of this, but Maria says that one night I came into the Studio Barn at Bedlam Farm where she was working in the night, and we were both divorced then and beginning to recognize that something was happening between us – my daughter Emma spotted it instantly, pointing out all my treks to the barn carrying fresh popcorn, chocolate and tea.

Maria said I stunned her when I suddenly began talking suggestively – well, talking dirty – about what we might do if we got together. I remember being stunned, I have never uttered such thoughts aloud in my entire life. I don’t know where they came from, I remember thinking demons had gotten ahold of my tongue, I was sweating and near to fainting.

I have never had a good image of myself or my body, ever thought of myself as attractive, surely not sexy. I didn’t really know that sexual attraction is not really about the body – that is a biological thing. It is about the mind, heart and soul. Never give up on love. Never give up on sex.

I was, at the time, over 60 already and you just don’t think of people that age saying the things I was saying. I did notice that rather than slapping me or throwing me out of her studio, Maria had this strange and wicked kind of gleam in her eye, like, “oh, this is a good thing to hear, this is okay.”

I have no memory of what I said, but Maria says I went on for a good long while, and then blushing and looking pale, I fled. Whatever I said, it was the right thing to say. We got together soon after. And sex reentered my life, it is like riding a bike, not something you really ever forget how to do, even if you haven’t done it for awhile.

I explained all of this to the Gulleys, and then I blushed all over again, although they were both laughing out loud. You might notice that my wife does not ever mind this talk, she is beaming ear to ear in that photo above, I recognize that gleam, I first saw it that night in West Hebron. She looked just like she did that night in the Studio Barn. It is okay for me to talk about sex now, in fact, it is a good thing.

Carol’s comments about my blog post brought all of this back to me, and I thought it was something that was important to share, if for no other reason than that it was hard to do. And that older people need to hear it. They are not disgusting or shameful if they think of sex, they are alive and beautiful.  And for me, talking about sex is not as hard to do as it once was. That is progress.

I didn’t tell Carol that I made a promise that night. I would never again live a life without sex, not at any age.