Woman

The old women, thrifty with words, haggling for oranges, their mouths take bites out of the air. They know the value of oranges. They had to learn everything on their own.

The young women are the worst off, no one has bothered to show them things. You can see their minds on their faces, they are like little lakes before a storm. They don´t know it´s confusion that makes them sad. It´s lucky in a way though, because the young men take a look of confusion for inscrutability, and this excites them and makes them want to own this face they don´t understand, something to be tinkered with at their leisure.

There was an old woman tossed in a basket.
Seventeen times as high as the moon;
But where she was going no mortal could tell,
For under her arm she carried a broom.

»Old woman, old woman, old woman,« said I,
»Whither, oh whither, oh whither so high?«
"To sweep the cobwebs from the sky;
And I'll be with you by-and-by

Frank Leigh Dearie once met a woman jazz pianist with the same last name. Blossom Dearie had a voice of orange creams and long lovely fingers. Staring at Frank across the space of a tiny table in a tacky restaurant just outside San Francisco, she knew just what she wanted.

What would this world be without women.
A world full of men.

Thrush is an infection which affects many women at some time in their lives. It is caused by a yeast called Monilia or Candida albicans which many people have on their skin or sometimes in the mouth and bowl.
Most of the time this yeast causes no harm and you would not know it was there at all.
But sometimes it multiplies and many cause infections, such as nappy rash in babies and mouth infection in the elderly.

There are many factors that can encourage yeast to multiply and cause thrush:
-warmth and moisture
-pregnancy
-antibiotics
-broken skin
-general health
-sex

A word said to come from an abbreviation for wolf-man or woe-(to)-man. Not so. The more appropriate word comes from feline-male. In the most ancient texts found in Mesopotamia, the word Hwomman represents God.

When I was in my early twenties, I knew everything there was to know about women.

Now some forty years later, I know nothing about them.

The older I get, the more baffled I am by them.