It was a day that began as regular as rain—coffee so strong and thick I could part it with a knife, my favorite morning show, and my surf of the internet for the news of the moment.
And then my muscles contracted as the first sentence of the online article jumped off the screen and nearly caused me to spit my Caldwell coffee all over my laptop keyboard.
“A woman’s body shape may influence how good her memory is. ‘Apple-shaped’ women fared better than ‘pears’ on cognitive tests.”
My bottom lip began to twitch and my eyeballs began to jitter back and forth as I scanned the remaining paragraphs for the punch line. Surely this was some kind of joke.
Nope.
“And pear-shaped women – those with smaller waists but bigger hips – scored particularly poorly.”
I was doomed.
Not only was the incessant growth of grey hair on my head far in advance of the schedule I had for myself at age 49, but now my ample hips were about to get in the way of more than the narrow doorway. They were about to impair my memory and render me unable to remember where I left my sunglasses and house keys.
It wasn’t fair. Just the other day I had finally come to the conclusion that these cougars in a gunnysack were here to stay, and I was okay with the ample part of my anatomy. I could displace my neck when I turned around and looked at my curvaceous baggage in the full-length mirror and then go on with my day and forget about what was back there.
Now it would seem, I really was going to forget about it!
It was happening already, I thought to myself as I sat in my computer chair flexing my gluteal nemesis “Maximus” and his cousins “Medius” and “Minimus.”
I’d forgotten what day it was and to make matters worse, when I looked out the living room window at how much the grass had grown overnight, I couldn’t remember “Did I just cut it yesterday?”
I began talking to myself. Was that also a sign that carrying excess weight on the hips was making matters worse?
“I don’t know,” I said to myself, “but I really doubt it. If I can’t remember that it’s you I’m talking to, then I’ll consider it a problem.”
Then my pathologically positive side kicked in—similar in speed to last week when I realized that not having a husband meant I could turn the barn into a girl cave.
“Think positive,” I shouted out loud at 6:30 a.m. “The junk in the trunk is one of your biggest assets. It’s the foundation of your being, the underside of your existence, the land under the water of your better half!”
And of course, true to their canine nature, the dogs translated my octaves into a call to breakfast and jumped around the kitchen like children on Christmas morning.
I could turn ‘re-butt’ this argument.
Thanks to my Irish and Scottish ancestors I would have a mind like a steel trap until the age of 110.
No pear-shaped behind of mine was going to be the iceberg to my titanic of a brain.
I thought about all the great construction scenarios my hips would be good for in the future, including when I held open the barn door and heaved out bar stools and old tools as the movers carried in the pink couch.
No comments:
Post a Comment