A woman tosses a bag of maxi pads on the counter. Dressed in a wonderfully flattering, skimpy mini-skirt she is barely recognizable as the 50ish woman who used to clean my mom's home.
"Yes," she says vibrantly giggling. "Yes, I still menstruate."
She winks at an older woman in the store and just as I sense a private joke is being shared, they decide to let me in on it. The older woman swipes her hand through curly silver locks and spryly approaches the counter.
"Well..." I have grown to like this mature "granny" who at first seemed standoffish and grouchy. She raises puppies and she can laugh at herself - how can she be all that bad?!
"Well..." she repeated and gave a full explanation of the adventure her ovaries have been having. When she went, years ago, for a scheduled hysterectomy the specialist informed her that, after much search, her "female parts" were nowhere to be found.
"They've been taken out," the doctor assured her. When, she had wondered, had they been robbed? The only deduction seemed to be that while she was in the hospital after suffering a miscarriage her entire feminine innards must have been purged. Then, last year during some testing for cancer, two very distinctive "blobs" turned up on the xrays. "One is an ovary," she was told, "and the other its shadow."
"Can you just imagine?" she wondered aloud, a lilt of mirth peppering her tale. "So," she stated in finality as she gathered her newly purchased goods and stepped toward the door, "so I asked him, 'Hey Doc, how are those ovaries of mine?' and he told me, "wrinkled and shrivelled up just like they should be!'" With a gleeful chuckle she was gone, holding the door for the maxipad-hugging woman behind her.
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