TeamReedBlog.2020

 I don't know what you did with your morning, but I saved a life before 8:15. Maybe three of them. I don't relay this information to shame you or to tout my own courage. It just seems like something you'd want to know. It started earlier this week when I went outside to add some kitchen scraps to my fancy new compost bin. I was coming back into the house and noticed my neighbor-friend's sister standing in Lois's back yard. Photo Credit: Ruthie "There's a possum," Ruthie said, pointing to the roof of the garage. Sure enough, there was an opossum up there, blinking away the early sun. Lois is a snowbird, and while she's away, I share pet duty with her large and super helpful family. Ruthie and I had a little possum chatter and agreed that while it seemed like the possum didn't need our help. "It got up there, it can get down," Ruthie pronounced, sounding very much like anyone in my family. I went back inside and got on with my day. Alis

My mom was pregnant nine times in 10 years and produced seven actual children; five girls and two boys. After me, No. 7, her body finally gave up (or merciful doctors called it) and she spent the next couple of months recovering from me and a total hysterectomy. The name of that procedure, by the way, bothers me. It's the removal of the uterus and the cervix (or I assume in my mother's case also the fallopian tubes and ovaries) so why isn't it called uterectomy? Or uterine-cervectomy? When they take out your appendix, it's "appendectomy." Ditto for "tonsillectomy." Why did they feel the need to imply hysteria in connection to the female reproductive organ?  And by "they" you know it's a bunch of old men. Human reproduction IS a kind of crazy process: a bit from a male and bit from a female human creates a third, and the female  then has to carry it IN HER BODY, grow it and spew it out in an exit strategy that would never be a designed b