It is with trepidation that I set my fingers on the keyboard and begin to tell this story. It is a chance for me to purge my feelings of fear and shame. I was ten years old and had a walk of over three miles to school and back each day. I would often ride my bike, but at times I'd just walk to feel the cool air of Tacoma, Washington in the fall. I would join with friends and we would laugh and make the journey seem somehow more than simply getting from one place to another.

I was late getting out of school having stayed behind to help my favorite teacher clean the chalkboards and prepare for the next school day. I was about half way home, carrying a broken tree limb and thinking about having a bowl of Post Alpha-Bits when I got home when it suddenly hit me. An overwhelming and cramping need to go to the bathroom. If it had been number one, I'd have ducked down an alley and peed on a telephone pole, but the need was more urgent and more private and I'd need toilet paper. I walked on trying to think of other things when a particularly strong wave of cramping hit me and with dread, I realized that this baby was going to be born before I reached the safety of home.

Suddenly and uncontrollably a torrent released from my bowels and the moist and implacable heat of a fresh bowel movement filled my backside. I duckwalked the final few blocks to home with a sweat breaking on my brow and a deep fear of discovery filling my very soul. I arrived to find my Mom and brothers gone. I stole away to the safety of my room and changed out of my pants and underwear. I placed the soiled underwear into a grocery sack and ran to the bathroom for one of the first afternoon showers of my life. I quickly and thouroughly cleaned up myself and the tub and rushed back to my room. I carried the offending sack of steaming underwear to the yard where I buried it behind my Mom's rhubarb plants.

It was the following Spring, that Mom found my underwear while working in her garden.