You never get a second chance at a first kiss

On my friend’s blog she asked us to tell the story of our favorite kiss. My first thought was of my first kiss. So I thought I would take you with me on this stroll down memory lane.

Every summer when we were kids my brother Lee and I would go visit my grandparents in Massachusetts. The summer I was 13 I had discovered boys and discovered Lee’s friend JSH. We were there for two weeks, during that time JSH and I danced around each other. We talked about the different places we could kiss. We did a lot of talking about our options but somehow we never got around to actually doing it.

The day before we were supposed to leave my grandparents were entertaining several guests. JSH asked me to meet him behind the hedge at the end of the driveway. When I got there he was waiting for me. We stood there hidden by the tall hedge, looking at each other for quite some time. Then finally he leaned in and kissed me. Fireworks were going off and I just stood there while he kissed me. He leaned back and said, “Don’t you know how to kiss?” I just kind of looked at him and he turned and went back to the pool. It may not have been great for him but for me it was a storybook first kiss.

That December my entire family went to visit my grandparents for Christmas. Lee, Jackson and I went down to JSH’s to go sledding in his yard. There was a motion detector light on the edge of his house at the bottom of the sledding hill that lit up the sledding path. After awhile Lee and Jackson went back to our grandparent’s house and JSH and I were alone. We decided we would wait for the light to go out before we kissed. Looking back it seems we talked more about kissing then actually kissing. We sat pretty still talking about lots different things. Eventually the light went out and we reached for each other, which of course tripped the motion sensor and the light came back on.

We didn’t wait for the light to go out again before we kissed. This time it lasted longer than the first and with more passion. Gone was the hesitation that comes with experiencing something for the first time. I kissed him back, put my arms around him, he twirled his fingers in my hair holding me close. I don’t know how long we actually stood there kissing, in my memory it lasted for hours, it was probably closer to 10 minutes.

I didn’t see him again before we went home. When I was 16 and was visiting my grandparents I went by his house, he wasn’t home but I had a nice visit with his mother. She told me that he was having a hard time, his parents were getting divorced and he wasn’t doing well in school. I went back to my grandparent’s house and wrote him a letter. I told him that kiss in the hedges had been my first and he would always hold a special place in my heart. I heard later he dropped out of school and before I graduated from high school his mother had moved out of the neighborhood.

That kiss, the one at the top of the hill, with all the passion two naïve teenagers could put into it, it still remains at the top of my list. I’m sure that time has sweetened the memory of that kiss, that’s okay, it’s my memory, seriously.