by Sarah Tyson
Every woman that I have ever bared my soul to has been furious. Not in the angry, mean kind of way but in the intense roaring, raging wind kind of way. You know this kind of woman who blows into a room and inspires you or rallies you to her cause of injustice or her plight of burnt salmon or her saga for being done wrong by this one or that one. This woman’s laughter can be heard down the block and the music of it fills the room with color, vibrant yellow and magenta. Her joy, as well as her sorrow, is long and deep and full. She will give you advice even if you don’t ask for it and it’s almost always what you needed to hear. She knows when to speak loud or whisper, when to hush up and just listen.
I could list you out, you furious women in my life. I would begin to write and the paper would roll out long and bounce across the floor like the lists on the movies do. So many of you have marched in just in time and others of you have melted away over the years. Some of you have died and the memory of you picking up hitch hikers and how the Avon lady called at your house and all your jewels and weathered photographs, they linger and thrive furiously in my soul. Some of you live too far away so I settle for you in doses and it’s always a delight to be in your furious presence. And a handful of you are a treat that I indulge myself in, some weeks more than others. When we are together, merry and content, we gather around the dining room table to feast and celebrate being alive, to clip coupons and solve all the problems.
To have known or become a furious woman is a gift to the world. We need your intense clanging and banging while you put away the clean dishes after dinner. We need you to say the thing we were all thinking, the inappropriate thing that sometimes only you can say. We need you to swoop in and save us with your chocolate chip cookies, to eat ice cream cones with us before dinner. How would we survive without your hair care tips, your child rearing wisdom, your knowing sigh to a day gone long and wrong. The world needs you furious woman!
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