It is a source of fascination to me that at age 74 my whacked-out hormones are still running amok, post menopause. Waking up suddenly from a sound sleep, all charged up and melting under the suddenly suffocating bed coverings on a cold winter night.

Makes me wonder, what on Earth might women have understood to be happening to them, those who lived long enough to experience the phenomenon of post-child-bearing years, in the Medieval era, for example. Would mendicant 'physics' have known anything of the female half of humanity's descent from its fecund state to its non-productive one? Would women think that the symptoms of menopause represented a personal decline in their health?

With a presumed paucity of elderly women living long enough to experience menopause, would women living isolated lives in vast countrysides outside urban areas have any inkling what was happening to them? For that matter, would the urban dwellers, likely the majority women of child-bearing years. Those who managed to live through to an elderly status, to whom might they speak to air their puzzlement?

Here we are, modern women growing gracefully into our elder status, bopping along trying to find quick fixes for a newly-diagnosed 'disease' of old age, which is simply nature's way of winding us down to find peace in an altered physical and sociological and psychical status.