I’ve got a couple of story ideas for when I finish revising the last novel of my trilogy—the second is due to release the first week in November. One’s about a woman who drives a truck (semi-tractor/trailer coast to coast) and another about a woman who checks herself in to an inpatient mental institution to escape a brutal husband. I’ve written short stories about both. But as I age, this woman tugs harder and harder on my thoughts.

So here’s how I’m meeting this week’s GirlieOnTheEdge blog challenge prompt. The word is scale.

She stepped on the scale and groaned—she’d just checked the zero balance and knew it was accurate.

When did her body go to hell?

She’d never needed to diet and she got plenty of exercise in her job—the camping, swimming, and canoeing didn’t hurt either. But then sometime in her late fifties and early sixties, her metabolism changed and it seemed like she could look at a dish of ice cream and gain a pound. Not spectacular, but annoyingly inexorable, the weight gain joined a host of aging signs, all of them familiar—graying hair, thin skin (there really is such a thing), stiff joints—she felt vaguely depressed.

But the symptom that really fried her bacon was the way people called her honey or patiently explained stuff she already knew rather than answering her question—and ignored any idea she presented as if she weren’t even in the room.