Dear P.

Here is a link to the challenge:

And please, forgive me...

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Dear P.,

Perhaps this is a little confusing. Your real name is Alison (or is that Alyson...or Alys? It is never clear in the text), but most of the world knows you as the wife. Or the Wife. The woman who travelled with all of those other pilgrims to that famous cathedral in England, and was given the longest of the prologues in Geoffrey's most famous long poem. You boasted of your five husbands, telling us of the three who were good - old, rich and submissive - and the two who were bad (not much detail there). You were also 'gat-toothed' (ah, that gap in the teeth was a symbol of its time that we may want to give back - so much sensuality in it). This was to symbolize your liberated sexuality...as if this was not already clear from the tale spilled out from your lips...

Ah, those lips...

When a woman is allowed to boast about her happy place, I pay attention. Your happy place... Your secret spot... Your eternal garden... I am still amazed that your story could be told by a man and yet still enter into the mind of a woman more so than any other writer of that era. No medievalist would have dared such honesty. No one would have thought to be so bold. And that is why this letter is not for you...

It is for her. Or it...

Oh, pudendum, the great provider of inspiration to the other chromosomed class, you deserve your own letter and prologue. How diminished and sad it would be if you were not the main character of this tale. Yes, dear Alyson does give us a wonderful tale of a knight convicted of a terrible transgression, leading to a conviction and a quest to discover what it is women really want. A fine tale it is...and one that we already have an answer for. You have made us all respect and love what a woman can be.

Oh, for a chance to be at that very gate...

Forgive my lack of modesty. There is enough lack of prudery out there and I know that there are many who think that literature should lie on dusty shelves and be ignored. But life is lived on those pages, and we should not ignore what is so honest and beautiful in your form.

And I hope to one day meet one that is worth its own story...

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