It is summer, hot and horny, and I am on a roll. So I am going to continue this theme of beauty, attraction, seduction, sex, love and self-love until I run out of content — or steam, whichever comes first.

By Jade Beaty, CO

Fast forward to the grim, gray, bone-chilling coldness of a central Texas January, 2004. Since leaving my home in Boulder, I’d been through a weird kind of chaotic instability, floating without a home, traveling in my new old truck, and suffering through a living situation that had ended with a long-term friendship blowing up, causing me to find myself homeless again at the end of the year. On top of this, I was in the last throes of menopausal hell. No health care, no money to get herbal help, feeling fortunate to have food stamps.

I’m of the opinion that menopausal women should be carried around on satin pillows, with a hot young stud working the fan. This is not what I was getting. But I did get a temporary place to live in a little bungalow cabin in the woods. In front of this cabin was an ancient looking tree that I suspected was dead. It was squatty and broken and was probably a fruit tree of some sort, I thought. It held a certain kind of comfort for me somehow, and I’d stumble out to it and lay in its low branches, breathing deeply and asking for help. I needed to feel like I had something still to offer. I needed to know that my heart could still love after being so broken, so many times, by so many tragedies. I needed hope, and it seemed there was none.

As the weeks wore on, I visited this tree almost daily, telling it my troubles. In early March there were buds on it. By mid-March is was obvious that this was, in fact, a fruit tree and I delighted in bringing armfuls of the blossoms into town and distributing them to everyone I saw. I knew that if the fruit were as plentiful as the blossoms, it would break the tree apart. And that’s just what happened. The tree filled with hundreds, thousands of tiny peaches, and I watched them grow into the juiciest, prettiest little things you’ve ever seen. Tasty, too. That tree broke completely apart, in spite of my call to friends to bring buckets and harvest all they could. And I did gain hope. If that tree could bloom it’s little old heart out like that, in its last season, surely my life could blossom again.

First published in “The Blissful Times” © Jade Beaty, December 2004

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Donna Henes is the author of The Queen of My Self: Stepping into Sovereignty in Midlife. She offers counseling and upbeat, practical and ceremonial guidance for individual women and groups who want to enjoy the fruits of an enriching, influential, purposeful, passionate, and powerful maturity. Consult the MIDLIFE MIDWIFE™

The Queen welcomes questions concerning all issues of interest to women in their mature years. Send your inquiries to thequeenofmyself@aol.com.