forty

I have ugly hands. It was surprisingly hard to get a picture of my hand.

I never paint my nails. My mother in law treated us to a manicure/pedicure over Christmas, and I liked having polish on so I did my own about 2 weeks after. This is why I don't wear nailpolish. I'm not good at taking care of it, then I walk around with my nails looking like crap for a month or two before I take the polish off.


I don't know when my hands started looking old. I wish I remembered what they looked like when I was young.  It's strange sometimes to look at my hands and see what looks like my mothers hands.

I wonder they'll look like in another 10 years. Twenty. I try and moisturize them everyday like my face.


When I was 10 or 12 or somewhere around there I fell off my bike. This wasn't the time I got a concussion, this was the time my hands skidded across the spring gravel (do you neighborhood kids remember that? The street cleaner and the smell of spring/dirt/roads)? Anway, I fell and skid and ended up with several not quite rocks but bigger than pebbles embedded in my palm - the palm of that hand pictured actually. I had to go to the doctor cause my parents couldn't get them out.


I have a scar on my middle finger of that hand and I don't know where it came from.

On the index finger of that hand, I sliced the corner of the tip off when I was cutting fabric one day. I was home with the boys and my husband was out. I'm horrible in emergencies. My then 6 year old called my dad for me (since I was pretty much hyperventilating) and went around the kitchen cleaning up the blood. You can still see where it healed because it's slanted and there is no part of my fingerprint there.


I've cracked my knuckles since I was probably 5. I crack them at least once a day. My first grade teacher used to yell at me about it and tell me it would make my fingers fat. It might have, I do have fat knuckles. I don't have slender hands/fingers. They are short and fat. And also, my fingers are crooked around the knuckles. So maybe she was right. She's also the one who yelled at me about my posture way back when and I do have terrible posture.


I notice hands on other people. When I'm interested in a guy, one of the very first things I notice is his hands. I notice them on friends and on my children. What the shape is. How large they are, if they're soft. I don't know why I notice that, I just do.

But yesterday was the first time I had noticed my own hands in a while. So, I took a picture.