Tennessee Woman
 

Women’s minds are often organized laterally while those of men more often from front to back. Women, further, have a bigger window on “what might go wrong” and are more often anxious and immobilized by children, friends, homes, and jobs and, oddly, depend sometimes on husbands to simplify things. Guys are often impulsive and reined in by prenatal events inside of mother as well as outside of mother later by preschool lectures and trips to the woodshed or to pediatricians, psychologists, and reading specialists. Guys are also shaped up by girlfriends when we beg them to replace our mothers or by high-verbal lawyers when we don’t keep our promises. (A truly “equal” society would have as many women jailed as men but it probably isn’t going to happen.)

Watch carefully and you, too, will see the nags pivoting arm-in-arm with the rule-breakers as if life were a square dance.
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Twenty-five Ohio activists swarmed a senator’s office. I stood aside and watched for a spell.

A tall woman passed by us. She was capped with short brown hair, her frame lean and browned like a marathoner and it moved as if she might be one. Her bearing also suggested a heritage of Appalachian long rifle feuders and shooters - the sort who kill after betrayal or an insult and never go to court...that’s just the way things are done.

Her ankles, shins, calves, thighs, hips, back, belly, chest, and arms were all covered with stickers…the kind that let people at conventions stare at your chest instead of your face. Each sticker of the fifty had a signature.

Omigod! There’s her mind!

“Where are you from?”

“Memphis.”

“See you in Nashville in February.”

She moved on, carrying along all of her friends….