Where did it go?

Time, that is.

10 months ago, a self portrait in April of last year. Don't mind the messy table, it is always that way. Of course this is where we eat, discuss life, and hang out. It is my 'work' station and our dining area. 

This morning.

I don't like self portraits per se. Especially now that I can see how I have aged. I wonder why it is okay for guys to be aged with wrinkles and it isn't so cool for women?

I'm an outdoors person. Most of my time is spent outside in all the weather. I've beat the hell out of my facial skin. Hopefully wrinkles will come in vogue. You know those lines around the eyes and mouth. That ugly neck that everyone covers up with fancy scarves. 

I thought it would be fun to do some black and white work while I was in the mood.

Hands. My hands and how they have aged.
Once upon a time I looked at hands that worked in an office that were primped and polished. Beautiful nails and smooth skin.

Funny how I never saw the arthritic bumps and lumps and rough skin that are my hands now. But that is the progression of age and outdoor work. Our skin is the organ we all choose to ignore.

I remember being so impressed with my grandmother's hands. They were knotted, crooked, and bumpy. I recall standing with her as she used a scrub brush to get the garden dirt out of the cracks in her fingers. She was going to church and didn't want the other church ladies to see her rough hands.

While I was thinking about hands hubby sat down to cut up and apple. He didn't realize I could 'shoot' from across the table. The benefit of having live view and a flip screen. I set the camera to silent.

If I didn't know these hands belonged to my husband, I would have thought they were my father in law's hands. Age, medical conditions, and medicines all contribute to this dramatic change. 

I find it intriguing and curious. I see his hands while he is using them, but they look so stark when caught in a moment of time.

I'm making my mind up to get more comfortable with the looks of age. After all, I can't avoid it at this point. And I am not going to look suddenly younger. 
The face in the mirror is still aging even if I don't quite feel it on the inside.

Then there was this matter of going upstairs to clean up the room I'd left a mess with things scattered about. Suddenly, I found myself distracted. 

And amused.

I went to put some things away and organize some other things.

Ahhh. 

Well there you go. Another benefit of aging.

You can always give the excuse that 'my mind wandered' while I was upstairs.

Time keeps going. Funny how we are surprised at the changes we never noticed.

Upstairs and experimenting

I really didn't want to move the bed in the tiny tiny room because to vacuum under it requires jiggling, lifting, this way and that and then moving the heavy bed a bit more one way and then the other way just to get under it and kill the dust monsters that lurk on the carpet under the bed.

While I was at it, I washed the walls down and changed the bedding.
It was snowing outside and it sounded like hail at the same time.

The weather was nuts. High winds, snow, then sunshine with snow and sunshine with glorious light.
And back to snow.

I stopped and looked through a forgotten album that had photos of my boys in it. It was a mix of dates stuck in a book so that I wouldn't lose them. The photos brought a smile to my face as I sat cross legged and looked through them slowly.

I eventually got back to work and had another bag of 'stuff' to get rid of. If I haven't used something in a long time I need to move it out.

I found a cheap piece of black plastic that I'd used a few times to make reflections with Still Life. I noticed that my hands actually were reflected when I reached for something.
And then I thought.
I wonder if I could take a photo of the reflection of my hands??

There was enough light coming in through the window to give an eerie glow to portions of my skin.

Remember, this is a reflection of my hands palm up towards the window.

So I liked this in a way because it was so different.

I decided to start trying different things with it. I discarded what I was working on and made my own texture and added text to it.

This was the end result of messing around.
I got to here and stopped.

I sat back and then closed the program.

I was done and the image stuck with me. It invoked something I couldn't quite describe, but it felt right.

It was a good experiment for how I'd felt off an on for the past couple of weeks.

Dang it All to ...

Well dang it all to heck and back.

I'm not going to really whine about this too much. Hmmm. Maybe I will. It seems that osteoarthritis has crept into my life. Well at least into my hands.
I of course figured that it wouldn't happen to me.

Stupid me. I sort of knew it would. My Grandmother Pearl had twisted gnarly hands and she barely whispered a word about it. I'd see her gardening, crocheting, sewing, and doing all those normal things with her beat up hands. At the time I admired those well worn hands and said something to her about it.
In all her infinite wisdom that I never learned...she replied, "Oh I don't think you want these hands. Some days they don't do so well."
She said this as she was artfully cleaning a fish with quick skilled movements.

My mom began to suffer the same fate as did her sisters. Arthritis crept up on their hands deforming them and sometimes twisting the joints.

Over the past year or so, my hands began to ache a lot. Certain movements hurt. Grasping things was painful. My left thumb continued to hurt making grasping door knobs a real chore. In fact when we remodeled, I had handles put on the door that I could just push down on.

Opening a jar can be tricky. Using an old fashioned can opener can be a trying feat. Over the winter my hands became worse. I developed Herberden's Nodes on the ends of my fingers. As those nodes develop, the pain is quite intense. I recall my father showing me the tips of his fingers and telling me that once the bump was formed, it stopped hurting, so it wasn't so terribly bad.
Oh, he was not kidding!

So this summer those wonderful little nodes pretty much quit hurting and I was able to get along except for the thumb issue. Sometimes at night, I'd fall asleep with a cold pack wrapped around the left hand. It numbed things enough so I could sleep.
Peeling apples for apple crisp last month made the pain nearly unbearable. So I decided to see how I could process apples without causing myself a lot of pain. Easier to make jelly, juice, and apple sauce than to peel apples.
Plus I got a food mill which helped tremendously.

Brushing the mules out for riding was even a bit difficult, but I decided worth the pain.

I sort of knew what may be going on with the hands. Goodness knows I've seen it in my grandmother, my mom, and my dad. However my fingers are not being deformed much.

So when my doctor and I looked over the hand X-ray results, I was sort of surprised. There it was osteoarthritis in both hands. No fingers were left unscathed.
The left thumb showed degenerative joint 'disease'. Oh. Ick.
Mostly it means that the hands will slowly get a bit worse as I get older.

Now dammit, how did I get older? In my mind I am about 30! I look in the mirror and see that older person looking back at me. She disappears when I take my glasses off. She looks much younger after I take a shower and peer at her in a fogged up mirror.

My doctor recommended that I see Occupational Therapy for exercises to strengthen my left hand and to see how they could suggest non drug like therapies to lessen the aches and pains. I am all for that. Our local clinic has an excellent PT/OT department and they have helped me quite a bit in the past.

How am I going to 'deal' with this? Well, now that I have a name and a cause for the pain, I will not quit doing things or baby my hands. The pain is not indicative of something that will harm me.
It is simply wear and tear. I need to work out how to do some things smarter and need to be aware of the "Use it or Lose it" theory. If I stop doing things with my hands, or I stop being active ... I will be in more pain and more health problems will arise.
If the body stops moving, it will destroy itself.

My doctor said that if the thumb issue got too bad she would send me to a hand specialist to explore injections [eeks!] and perhaps surgery [eek gads! NO!]. She said she had a patient who went through the surgical procedure and the recovery and PT time took about 6 months. No thank you!

This is not earth shattering but it will include some minor changes for me.

Yes, I think my father was correct. Aging is not for sissies.

Grandma's Hands

One of the things I recall from childhood is my Grandmother's hands.  

She gardened with gusto, she almost never wore shoes in the garden or around the place either.  She had a razor sharp hoe, but when it got to the nitty gritty, she got into the dirt and pulled weeds with her hands.

She never wore gloves.  I'm not sure there were gardening gloves back then for women.  You just went out into the garden and got your hands dirty.

I can recall going over to her house to get her.  Mom was going to get in the car and we were all going to go to town.

Grandma was in her house with a scrub brush soaping her fingertips and scrubbing away at the dirt that had embedded itself into her fingers.

I always thought it was neat how the dirt made the lines in her hands stand out.  

I learned to understand that she didn't.  She didn't like the dirt that was embedded and tried to get it out before she went anywhere public.  Especially to town.

She explained once that the women in town didn't have dirt in their hands like hers.

I didn't understand it when I was young, but I think the town ladies looked down on the ones who lived in the countryside and worked 'in the dirt'.  I saw it as cool and a sign that my Grandma Pearl was tough as nails.

She wasn't a soft lady who drank tea and always wore dresses.

I think her hands embarrassed her when she was around the church ladies or town people.  It never bothered me, I liked her rough hands.  They were nice to hold as a child.

I looked down at my hands after pulling weeds in the perennial garden this year.  The gloves were still in my back pocket.  I always intend to wear gloves when weeding and pulling, but they always come off.

My hands become embedded with dirt and sometimes the hardest scrubbing won't take the dirt out.  I find myself then thinking about those hands of Grandma's and I smile a bit.

"A little dirt never hurt anybody," she was fond of saying.

I think she was right.

I do love getting my hands into the soil.  It just doesn't feel right with gloves on.  You can't feel the roots of the plant you are pulling out.