BIG IS BETTER
By XH4M
This story is a fantasy. All characters in this story are fictional with no resemblance to any real persons implied. Any reader with objections to graphic descriptions of sexual encounters between males, who may not have reached the legal age of consent, or whose local, regional, state or national jurisprudence prohibits such descriptions, should NOT read further. Copyright (c) 2000 XH4M. All rights, implicit or implied, except for distribution by this archive and personal use by the individual downloading the file, are reserved. Inquiries regarding publishing rights for this story should be directed to: xhuge4muscl@hotmail.com
PART 02 - FAMILY 'TREES'
I was born in late November, not in the maternity ward of hospital but rather in my parent's bed at home. Home was a large rural farmhouse located within the town limits of place called Intercourse. Our town, in turn, sat inside the borders of the County of Lancaster, roughly in the geographic center of the great State of Pennsylvania.
I never stepped foot outside of the Lancaster County for the first 18 years of my life. Moreover, I seldom stepped beyond the borders of my family's large farm except to attend Amish school, or church, or to take occasional trips into the town center which happened as a rule only on Saturday mornings.
The whole of Lancaster County was then, and still is dominated by several distinct groups of Amish people - and yes, I'm Amish-born, too. My family belonged to a particular Amish group known as the 'Old Order.' It's a tight-knit, pious and very closed clan governed by a group of men known as the Elders. You would find the social order extraordinarily conservative to a degree likely incomprehensible to you.
And rules - there were rules in abundance - rules governing just about every aspect of Amish life. If I could somehow condense all of the Amish philosophy concerning life into one short phrase, it would be, "Keep It Simple." And in the tradition of keeping it simple, as a young boy I only knew of two groups of people in this world - the Amish and the 'Outlanders.' Outlanders were anyone living outside of an Amish community. It's also a given that most Outlanders, or "The English" as they are referred to by our Indiana Amish brethren, would understandably view our rigid Amish social conventions as being very repressive and even backwards. Nevertheless, these were 'our ways.' My parents were raised with 'these ways,' and so for that matter was I. But above all else, it is also a community and social structure which strongly supports and cares for its own.
My education was received in a private Amish one-room schoolhouse for the first 8 grades, then I subsequently transferred to the regional public high school. The magnitude of the culture-shock I experienced during that first year in public high school was simply just stunning; moreover my freshman year of public high school was also the very first time I would come to know any of these Outlanders more personally.
My family life was extraordinarily simple. We had neither electricity nor a telephone nor plumbing in our farmhouse. The only running water came from a one hand pump mounted on a corner counter in our large kitchen. There were two vehicles always parked in the barn ready for my family's use. One was a pretty snazzy black convertible, actually. We used it most often during the fairer and warmer months. The other was a hardtop utilized mostly during the cold Pennsylvania winters. One of my first routine chores as a very young boy was to take care of the large work horses we used to pull our vehicles, too.
Both of my parents were also born and raised in Lancaster County. Mine is a long lineage of hard-working and God-fearing farming folk who had always meticulously kept to the proscribed old ways. My parents were trilingual and so am I. A dialect of German called Pennsylvania Dutch was spoken at home. We used High German during our church services and I learned English in our private Amish community school.
Farming "Amish style" was then, and for that matter still is to this today, a particularly hard and physically demanding life. The work is performed without the benefit of any mechanized vehicles or machinery whatsoever. The work rituals and daily chores were endless; our days routinely began well before sunrise each and every morning and didn't end until sundown. This went on 7 days a week and 52 weeks a year. Vacations were a concept completely unfamiliar to the Amish. I didn't have many friends growing up, but that wasn't particularly unusual for most Amish farm children either. My social life revolved mostly around my own family, and whatever childhood play I engaged in was done primarily with my brothers, and to a much lesser degree with my closest neighbors who happened to also be my 1st cousins - and to put 'closeness' in a better perspective, that would have been roughly a mile away. But there was little time for playing, at least as you'd probably conceive it. The farm work just never ceased.
My parents themselves were just plain 'good folk' - very honest people - honest in a way too unknown in this modern, fast-paced world of ours. My parents were loving and very giving. The degree of their generosity again wouldn't likely be easily comprehended by anyone not raised within an Amish community. My mother was an incredible woman. To say she was just hard-working would grossly minimize what that woman accomplished on a daily basis. She was petite, but don't let that description fool you. Physically, she was one very strong woman. If someone ever videotaped my mother's daily routine, it would have easily been the killer workout tape of all time. She had beautiful alabaster skin and dark-rosy cheeks that absolutely radiated from underneath the bonnet she often wore - a rather striking physical feature of her's which you doubtlessly would have instantly noticed. Mom also had a perpetually big smile for everyone and very infectious laugh. And her heart, well... it was as big and wide open as the rolling hills of Lancaster County.
My father was only of average height but possessed a lean-and-mean build, with unusually broad shoulders and a narrow waist which made him appear to be taller than he was. He was on the quiet side and usually said very little. Somewhat characteristic of the Germans, he was also stern but never mean. And completely characteristic of the Amish, my father was the undisputed and never-questioned supreme head of our family as well as its spiritual leader and guide.
Both of my parents practiced the creed, "Do Unto Others" every single day of their lives. Neither was physically demonstrative about expressing love and affection though. There was little to no touching or kissing, as I recall, once any of my siblings were out of the cradle - but there was never a doubt that we were all loved regardless. That was clearly expressed by them both in countless other ways and actions. But as for physical touch - kissing and hugging - that never was 'their way,' nor likely the way they had been raised by their parents before them.
A part of me wants to tell you that it was a very good life - and today, I can more deeply appreciate certain aspects of having grown up in such an uncomplicated world, more now than I did perhaps back then. But this strict social system of the Old Order also commanded obedience and 'doing one's duty' without question. Above all else, the lifestyle demanded total and unequivocal conformity.
I don't return often to Lancaster County these days. As a well-educated and more 'worldly-wise' adult now, it's simply a world I don't fit into at all; moreover, as a gay man I never really did. If the Amish even have a concept or word for 'gay' at all, well I've never heard of it. That tells you something about the prevailing social morays.
Let me emphasize that Amish beliefs and social conventions uniformly produced extremely naive kids, especially when it came to anything at all having to do with the human anatomy, let alone the "birds and the bees." While I remained totally clueless about such things as a boy growing up within the Amish community, again I remind you this was quite typical for my peer group.
The discussion of anything remotely sexual was strictly verboten (forbidden). Nudity was absolutely unheard of and frowned upon to the extreme. I've thought at times that my parents somehow managed to produce four offspring while essentially remaining fully-clothed. 'Lust' to the Amish is the preeminent carnal sin and to be guarded against at all costs. So in terms of my personal knowledge of anatomy, physiology and especially human sexuality, I was sadly essentially a total moron - and I'd remained in that sexual naivete until I eventually went away to college.
To put this into another perspective, I didn't even have German or English words or even a rudimentary vocabulary to describe genitalia or anything remotely sexual in nature. I knew no 'names' for anything and often resorted to making up my own terminology in my head. This total lack of useful information on the subject would also make my life as a gay boy in Lancaster County even more confusing than it might have been otherwise if I'd been reared in the more progressive Outlander's world.
I never saw my mother, sister or my younger brother naked - not even once in my life. And I'd only seen my father and my older brother Zechariah naked just a very few times - and mind you, those times were also completely accidental.
But I vividly remember my brother Zec's male appendage. Just one little peek and its dimension was permanently etched in my memory. He was maybe 16 or 17 years old at the time when I first saw 'it.' I was perhaps age 6 or so. It was seeing my father's particular male endowment however that frankly stunned me. I only glimpsed my father's 'thing' for a few seconds on a couple of occasions - and the man was simply an elephant with this 'trunk' attached to him. Among the elite of the greatest male airships that ever existed in this world, my father's was der riesig schwengel - absolutely the undisputed Hindenburg.
After I'd seen the sizes of these two other males in my family, I do remember bemoaning privately how unbelievably tiny my own 'little thing' was, comparatively. Unfortunately my father's and brother's behemoths were also the only points-of-reference available to me as a curious boy. I'd formulated all my concepts of what I'd assumed was the 'male average' accordingly. Since I was always shorter than other boys my age - another fact I loathed about myself - I also automatically assumed I was a runt in that department as well, which was more-or-less proven to me as being the gospel truth by my having spotted these other two males in my family. I distinctly remember not feeling at all good either about how very little my very little thing was.
My self-concept was to eventually become... well... revised....