Sitting in fire

This is my first and final fall as a resident of the Pacific Northwest. And this is the first time I have been able to recognize the season. Fall is very different here than in the Upper Midwest. All the trees here do not turn colors all at once like they do back where I come from. Here in Seattle, it is rare to see an entire, single tree all red or orange; even single trees seem to turn color in patches. In my first falls out here, I kept waiting for all the trees to be red all at once. This never happens here so I never quite noticed 'fall'. This year, I see and feel fall.

Four years ago, when I first lived here, I was on fire with menopause. I moved here in September. For my first months out here, I lived on Whidbey Island in an unheated cabin. There was a space heater, of course. But I was on such fire most nights that I did not turn on the heat nor did I use blankets. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would go outside and dance in the rain, naked, to try and cool off. It didn't help. I never found anything that could cool my hot flashes, although, of course, I never took hormones. Hormones might have helped but I resist them.

There is no cooling off a months-long hot flash. Night after night, I stayed up all night reading. The insomnia was unrelenting.

I did not sleep for two years, or so it seemed to me.

This fall, I am still hot flashing. Now my hot flashes come and go, they don't last for days, weeks, and months.

A few weeks ago, in Berkeley, someone doing research on menopause interviewed me. She said that she has met women who went through menopause in a few weeks or, fantastically, overnight. She said that some women have no menopausal stress. This is incomprehensible to me. I've been having some kind of hot flashes for at least six years.

Why am I sitting in so much fire?