Member-only story
Listening to Women’s Stories
Yesterday, I was sitting at a picnic table with a woman I had just met and the sunlight was absorbing into her dark red hair making the tips look like they had ignited. Her eyes were sparkling, amplified by the wrinkles that radiated out from them, like starbursts.
I thought to myself, This woman is beautiful.
I had only learned her name an hour before, and confessing that she would forget mine, she said, I’ll just call you honey-darling.
We talked there in the sunlight a long time. As she talked, I thought about sitting in the kitchen as a child listening to my mother and my aunt intensely talk while slicing cucumbers and about my uncle leaning over to my brother man-to-man, saying, Women can just go on for hours, can’t they? And I thought about all the times I’ve been chided by partners because I am most certainly what you would call “a talker,” late nights with friends out on the porch and long forty-minute goodbyes.
The woman at the picnic table was going a mile-a-minute, her words spilling out from her so quickly that sometimes they fell on top of each other in a puddle and she scooped them back up in her sun-spotted hands and tried again.
And I thought to myself, Maybe this is what happens, all this babbling and carrying-on, when you live in a world that sanctions you no air time.
