PART 1: Family

Chapter 1: Farmers at Play

As we drove up to the Gutierrez family farmhouse, I half-shouted over the lowering roar of mi burro, “I don’t remember their front yard looking that good last fall before we left. Is it always this nice in the spring?”

“No,” Kaitlyn replied, matching my volume. As we slowed to a stop beside the house, she added in a more normal conversational level, “It’s never looked this good. They must’ve been working on it since we left.”

We were walking up to the front door when her father opened it and called out, “Davie, Kaitlyn, come on in!”

He offered us this greeting while utterly nude, standing in his front door, smiling challengingly.

This was surprising for a few reasons.

First, Ramón Gutierrez never had been one of the most enthusiastic of our nudist converts. Something had apparently changed.

Second, the Gutierrez family farmhouse faces out into a rural farm neighborhood. There’s only one other property with a direct line of sight to their front door, and while they’re open about their recent conversion to part-time nudism with that other property’s owner, some lost stranger could end up driving down the dead-end country lane that serves both farms, getting an eyeful before turning around to get themselves un-lost.

Third, this is Southern Utah; ’nuff said.

“Hi, dad,” greeted Kaitlyn, giving him a peck on the cheek and a hug, following him inside, a small smile being her only comment on this situation.

“Ramón,” I greeted him in turn, extending a hand for him to shake. He grabbed it and used it to pull me into a hug. This was the first time he’d done this. I had a guess at what had turned us from a handshake relationship to a hug relationship, but now was not the time to ask for confirmation.

“I’ve missed you, my boy,” he told me from the embrace.

“Awwww!” Kaitlyn cooed, fingers interlaced into a pillow under her tilted head. “That’s thooo thweeet!”

“Hush, you,” we said in unison, laughing.

“C’mon, you two. Party’s in back.”

Kaitlyn tossed the pound of butter into the fridge on our way through the kitchen into the privacy-fenced retreat area behind the house.

The first thing I noticed was that a newly installed outdoor shower was running, its white noise drawing my eye toward it. Under its spray was Allison, Kaitlyn’s cute little sister, younger than her by about three years at 22. Sitting on a patio chair watching this lovely sight was her betrothèd, Joss Taylor, about her same age and as nude as she was. As I watched, Allison squatted down, picked up a handful of the sand at the base of the shower and began scrubbing herself all over with it.

I waved briefly at the couple, but my interest was drawn to the new plumbing.

(Go ahead, call me a nerd. I can take it.)

The shower was clearly tapped into the hallway bathroom’s potable water lines. The spray hit the sand where it was filtered down to a trickle through a mesh in the sandbox’s front, then channeled down a slight incline in a dished section of the slate paving into the large round sandstone-lined pool offset from the center of the retreat area. The once-used water was thus captured for a second use before being whisked away from the bathing pond to a third use in the front yard, creating a flow-through design.

I realized that this explained the verdant front yard: it’d been getting not only plenty of water but also minerals and other good things to make plants grow.

The shower was only a secondary feed for the pool. The primary was a bubbling water feature at the back of the retreat area, fed by the farm’s irrigation system, filling the pool with all natural river water down from the Colorado, our own private skinny-dipping cove.

Across the pool from the shower were a pair of reclining deck chairs occupied by two nude women.

No fantasy scene out of porn this: one was Kaitlyn’s mother, a matronly figure of about fifty, the other their skinny wrinkled elderly neighbor Ann Johannsen, somewhere in her mid-seventies, who lived alone on the neighboring farm. I smiled broadly at the pair, two of my favorite people in this world. Judging by their all-over tans, both had been getting a lot of use of those deck chairs.

“I’m very surprised to see you here,” I greeted Ann, holding out a hand for her to shake.

Ann replied, taking my hand in hers, “After what you showed me back at Christmas? I’m a true nudist convert, thanks to you.”

I bent formally and kissed her hand in acknowledgement, extracting a girlish giggle from her, then began greeting the rest more casually.

Into Allison’s ear, I whispered, “May I infer that Ann’s invited to your wedding?”

“Yes, she’s coming,” Allison said aloud, referring to the nude wedding she was now on the hook for, having lost a dare to me back around New Year’s.

I believed she’d have gone through with it anyway, though, since I’d wed Kaitlyn the same way last August, with the whole Gutierrez family present. I’d already decided she was a bit of an exhibitionist back then, so her lost bet was pro forma, a way to excuse something she’d already wanted to do. I’d happily give her cover with anyone who didn’t believe it was her own idea.

I turned to their elderly neighbor, saying, “Oh, I’m so glad to hear it! The last one was wonderful.”

“I’ve heard, I’ve heard,” she reassured me from her chaise longue. “Another blessing of my curiosity toward all this recent nudism,” she added.

“Any idea why you did react that way?” I asked her. “I mean, I gather that you’re a fairly conservative person. Another might’ve called the cops or shunned the family or similar. You took some time to come around, as I recall, but with each experience, you got closer, not more distant. Why?”

Ann shrugged. “I suppose I just never saw any real harm in it. A bit of fright from the initial uncertainty, but when the sky continued not to fall each time I saw one of you naked then eventually tried doing it myself, I got right on over that.”

“Well, we’re happy to have you, Ann,” I said warmly.

After another minute of chatting, Kaitlyn’s mother Mary clucked impatiently, “Why have you two still got your clothes on‽ Go get showered, and let’s have a soak together.”

Allison and Joss were already in the sandstone-lined pool by this point, so Kaitlyn gave me an “after you” wave, correctly guessing that I was more interested in trying the new shower out for myself than watching her do so.

We’d already cleaned ourselves magically before leaving home, yet even aspy old me could see that acceding to Mary’s demand was partly a communication to the group: “See, I am clean!” With that in mind, I executed the social gesture properly, not rushing the job.

What I did not understand was why people in gyms studiously avoided looking at other people in the shower, then went on to make icky faces when confronted by a piece of exercise equipment recently used by someone else. Wouldn’t it be better to be certain who’s clean and who isn’t? Then you don’t have to worry about which equipment is safe to use and which not; you’d know. People are strange.

I found I thoroughly enjoyed showering outdoors. Scrubbing off with handfuls of wet sand was a nice alternative to soap, and whoever did the plumbing sent the hot line thru as well as the cold, so I could adjust the shower temperature to suit my taste.

I said as much, and Ramón observed, “Gracias, it was a fair job of work to get that done. Look off to the right: see the little bubbler I added?”

Indeed, there it was in the corner of the retreat area, a small fountain so you didn’t have to go back inside to get a cold drink of water. Club Med this was not, but for a rural Utahan farmhouse retreat, this was one sweet little setup.

When I turned around in the shower to wash the wet sand off my back, I noticed I had an audience: all four women were watching me avidly. Apparently they all liked chocolate cake.

Not beefcake; I’m in shape, but I’m no gym rat. No magic here, just near-daily bike commuting, some martial arts, and the occasional sneaky use of the equipment at Kaitlyn’s gym when we were there together and no one was around to bust me for being there without my own membership.

I was pretty sure I was too dark to visibly blush at this attention, so I left the shower running for Kaitlyn and got into the Gutierrez family’s new naturist bathing pool. It was just as I’d expected: a little private slice of skinny-dipping in the Colorado without any danger that some martinet of a park ranger would come along and level a complaint about indecent exposure. Indecent, indeed! A charge of showing what half the world has and most of the rest have seen as well. Pfagh!

“This is wonderful, people!” I complimented. “You’ve even gone out of your way to get soft sand for the shower!”

“Caught that, did you?” asked Ramón, who was not yet too dark to blush despite his genetically dusky coloring, further darkened with a farmer’s tan, then with a nudist’s tan. I still had him by a shade or two.

“Yeah,” added Mary, the paler and more expansive of the couple, “Miguel and Ramón went out and bought a few bags of play sand from the home store rather than retrieve it from the nearby desert,” she said, bragging on her son and husband.

“Soft sand?” asked Kaitlyn. “There is such a thing?”

“Yeah,” I answered, slipping smoothly into professor mode. “Sand comes in several types, one aspect of which is how rounded its corners are. Sand crushed from rock has the sharpest corners, so it makes the best sand for use in concrete: the corners prevent it from shearing as easily. River bottom sand is tumbled, knocking some of the corners off, but it’s also useful for concrete. The worst for concrete is blown desert dune sand, since it does nothing but tumble endlessly, becoming soft by comparison. Play sand like they’ve got in the box at the base of the shower is usually washed and tumbled mechanically rather than be scooped up raw from desert sand dunes.”

I continued, “Sand’s the most common mineral in the world, but there’s actually a shortage of sharp sand in particular: too much concrete being used in construction, too little sharp sand available for use in it. Would you believe that there’s actually a black market in sand as a result? One of the areas of most rapid construction in recent years was in Dubai, a city surrounded by more sand even than Moab, yet they had to ship the stuff in from as far away as Australia!”

“You are such a nerd,” huffed Kaitlyn comically.

“But you love me anyway.”

Mary prevented my wife from continuing the mock bicker, “We can’t take the main credit for this, Davie: you did most of the work.”

“Nonsense. I did most of the stonework to be sure, but all this plumbing and electrical service, installing the pumps… I’d be surprised if it netted out even half my work in fair terms, and that’s without getting into the hard costs: the pumps and the furniture at the least. I paid nothing for the stone, just lifted it up from the earth where it had been waiting eons to be used.”

Sounding surprised, Joss asked Allison, “He’s a stonemason? I thought you said he was some kind of computer guy?”

“He is,” she began. “He…ummm…”

While his girlfriend was trying to come up with an explanation while preserving our secret, Joss squinted his eyes a bit and asked, “And what is this about lifting the stone up?”

By Ritchie’s beard, I’d stepped in it again. Allison couldn’t save me now.

As I was debating internally about how to extract myself, Allison spoke, “You can trust him, Davie.”

I nodded to her, then mentally reached out through the quasi-natural retreat area’s stonework to Kaitlyn, asking through our Gaia bond, «Should we?»

She replied, «We might as well, Davie. Joss will be married into the family soon, and we’ll be honor-bound to tell him then.»

«What about Ann?» I asked my wife, referring to the only other person here who didn’t know that we were mages.

Aloud, Kaitlyn asked her mother the same question.

“Her, too. Spill!” Mary responded decisively.

I began trepidatiously, “All right, you two, what we’re about to show you is approximately as valuable as our very lives. If you tell anyone of what I’m going to show you, there’s an excellent chance you’ll never see Kaitlyn or I again. I am extending to you a grave trust.”

Ann and Joss nodded solemnly, so I addressed Ramón, “Would you please go turn on the outlet pump? That’ll start the front yard sprinklers right up, I assume?”

“That’s right, son,” he replied.

“Well, it’s kind of a waste to run the sprinklers mid-day, but I need a demonstration, and this will do,” I told him.

“We rigged the pump with three-way switching so we can control it from both inside and outside the fence, Miguel and I,” he said with a note of pride in his voice, walking over to an upright conduit beside the privacy fence, atop which was an outdoor-grade electric light switch.

After he’d flipped the outlet pump on, I checked my magic and was relieved to find that the pump didn’t interfere. I was on the side of the pool closest to it, but it had to be three meters away at the least; an electric pump wasn’t even a patch on the tech complexity of a smartphone. Good.

Without another word, I pushed some magic into the pool, preferentially pulling everything that wasn’t water towards and past myself to the outlet pump’s screened pipe, turning the pool crystal clear in seconds.

“You can turn the pump back off, Ramón,” I said over my shoulder, not having to speak up over its quiet operation. Another nice sign: they’d gone out of their way to get a high-quality pump for this.

“Joss, Ann,” I addressed the initiates, “Kaitlyn and I are mages,” sweeping my hands across the pool as proof, its contents previously being the translucent light brown color of the Colorado River. “At the moment this water is clean enough to drink, though I caution you, if you’re going to do so, do it quickly; it’s still bathwater of a sort.”

No one took me up on my invitation, but we spent the next half hour answering questions and offering further proofs of our claims.

While we did this, Ramón was quietly making trips back and forth to the house, getting the promised BBQ set up, not bothering to re-dress, the back patio being much more private than their front yard. It’s only enclosed by the farm’s rail fence, but the house and the retreat area fencing largely shielded it from public view.

The exposed 90° angle included the dead end of a country lane that only served this farm and the neighboring one, mainly for access to the fields by heavy equipment. There wasn’t much call for an outsider to drive down far enough to see back here, well past the farmhouse driveways.

You could see in from the neighboring farm, but that belonged to Mrs. Johannsen, one of us nudists now, so we were all but private here.

The only other public place you could see down in here from was atop the bluff behind the farm, something like 250 meters high, and its base something like half a kilometer away besides, past the furthest fence, behind the last field. I don’t think a cry of “indecent exposure” counts for anything if you need binoculars to see so-called naughty bits, not even in Southern Utah.

“By telling you this,” I finished after we’d satisfied the curiosity of Joss and Ann, “you’re both about as thoroughly initiated into the family as I know how to make you. Ann, I’m happy to have you. Joss, you’d better not flake on Allison at the altar! This is a mage speaking to you now, got it?”

I said this last with a smile, but he nodded most seriously at the implied threat. I don’t know why. I wouldn’t have roasted him in his boots or anything. Maybe singed him a bit, at most.