You Write Like A Girl!

Looking through my trove of scribbles that I've saved through the years, I came across this short piece that I wrote in a burst of nostalgia.I showed it to a male friend, and he remarked "You write like a girl!" That somehow sounded like a bad thing to me. Reading it now, I think, "Of course I wrote like a girl; I was a girl!

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Of Trees and Childhood Memories

It is a humid Friday afternoon and the sky is scowling with ill-temper. I am frowning too, as I walk along Buendia Avenue to the bus stop.

A heady scent assails my senses, and I break into a smile as I notice the narra trees in bloom. I am transported to the summers of my childhood and I see in my mind's eye that section of Taft Avenue where we used to live -- a wide band of black asphalt lined with narra trees. The trees are tall and spreading, the branches of the trees on either side reaching out to touch each other, thick with shiny green leaves. In the summer they look so glorious, bursting with a million tiny golden-yellow flowers. Soon the hot summer winds blow off the flowers and they line the sides of the street, fragrant golden rivulets against the black asphalt.

How I loved standing on that sidewalk, scruffing my feet on the thick carpet of yellow, filling my lungs to bursting with the delicious perfume!

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In "The Female Brain" Louann Brizendine, M.D. writes: "In the brain centers for Language and hearing,... women have 11 percent more neurons than men. The principal hub of both emotions and memory formation -- the hippocampus --is also larger in the female brain, as is the brain circuitry for language and observing emotions in others."