Hands

Last week I was helping out with a Bingo program at work and my coworker was drawing the wooden Bingo balls and handing them to me.

The program was an hour long and there were many balls handed to me to put on the register.

Each time she handed something to me, I became acutely aware of her soft, pale, delicate hands, her clean fingernails, the cute freckles on her skin, and how very feminine they were.  My hands, in direct contrast, are dark, scarred, cut, rough, dry, cracked, my fingernails are all broken or gnawed off, and there still manages to be dirt wedged up under them in some areas that I cannot get out.  As she handed me these Bingo balls hundreds of times, I started feeling self-conscious about the disparity, wondering if she noticed this as well.

It took about a half-hour of feeling ashamed of my hard hands before I realized something.  I've earned these hands!  My hands are the hands of someone who uses them for big things, whether it's cooking/baking, building things, digging in dirt, or anything else that exposes them to elements and work.  My hands have lately been doing things they've never done before, like wrestling bowed boards and drilling them together, or haranguing a used wheelbarrow into my trunk from a seller on Craigslist, or assembling furniture, or breaking down loads of boxes, or hauling lumber, rain barrels, and 40-pound bags of dirt.  I've been using tools I've never touched before, working on projects I've never tried before, and yes I have had mishaps, but my hands are getting the workout of their lives.  Nothing I've done prior to this compares with the exposure they're having now.  They're being used, like *really* used, in a way that's probably more true to human survival than they've ever known.  They're doing what they were intended to do.  Not typing at a computer all day, not washing dishes, not driving a car, but actual work.  So I'm okay with them needing to be scrubbed hard with a brush at the end of the day, and I'm okay with having to use hardcore lotions to keep the cracks and peeling from becoming too painful, and I'm kind of excited by the cuts and scars I'm accumulating.  Soon the skin is going to be much darker from the sun and will alter the appearance of my hands again.  I'm okay with this.  Actually, I'm pretty proud of it.  And I'm looking forward to whatever else this tiny saga has in store for my hands.