If eyes are the windows to the soul, then what are fingernails? Some kind of decorative cabinet hardware?  If so, make mine Oil Rubbed Bronze please.

My fingernails look and feel like corduroy.  I know that studying my nails at this level might be a sign that I need to look for something better to worry about. Yet I can’t help noticing their ripple-y texture when my fingertips happen to brush across their surface.

And my fingers seem to have taken on a life of their own. They bend and curl without help from my mind. A kind of Yuri Geller effect. I wonder what it means, besides getting older and frailer, which is not news to me. Fingers and hands connect us to our world. How they feel really matters.

Gotta Hand it to You

I’ve always noticed hands. Last week I watched as a friend sliced a tomato while holding it in her palm and drawing the sharp paring knife towards the web of her thumb.

In her practiced hands, hands that reminded me of my own grandmother’s, this movement was a safe as any other you could make with a blade.  For a brief moment I felt like I had my grandmother back and I smiled.

And since I’ve mentioned her, my mother’s mother was an inveterate solitaire player. I remember watching her hands flip the softened playing cards onto the plastic covered dining table in the late afternoons. My dad’s mother, well she was missing part of her ring finger on her right hand.

My Great Aunt Violet, grandma’s sister-in-law, died just over a month ago. The last time I saw her she was in a hospital bed in a nursing home. My eyes were drawn to her fluttery hands.

The web of purplish collapsed veins on their backs showed the painful frequency of blood work and intravenous vitamins. But her long, elegant fingers were tipped with perfectly shaped pink polished nails. This was courtesy of girls enrolled in the local beauty academy doing their community service, bless their hearts.

Violet’s hands moved in ways that I remembered from my childhood to fluff her cropped white hair and to tidy the scattered newsprint. Her voice was a thin whisper but her wit was as sharp as ever.

“I don’t have to wash the dishes anymore,” she said, wagging her pretty fingertips.

At the Breaking Point

I watch my husband’s hands as he does his infernal Sudoku on his iPad. His index fingers are just starting to curve with arthritis so much like his late mother’s.  I guess my cranky mother-in-law is still with us in a way.

My mother has gardener’s hands with nails that dig and scrape and pull weeds. It must be the fertilizers, the bone meal or manure that make her nails as tough, white and strong as the stays of a whalebone corset.  Her industrious hands have weakened over time and she now has “trigger finger,” a painful tendon condition. And so, I wince to say, have I.

My father, now 92, has the same “corduroy fingernails” problem that I do and from time to time we discuss our various solutions. We weigh the merits of herbal or vitamin supplements and ponder the hidden gaps in our excellent dietary regimens.

“Have you tried rubbing in Sun Oil?”

“Been laying off the soap for hand washing?”

“Does that Biotin stuff work for you?”

It’s a mystery to us both and a painful one at that.  Our fingernails bend and split and flake apart like broken chips at the bottom of the bag. The “splits” can reach deep into the tender quick offering a tactile reminder with every touch.

Time to Show Your Hand

I play cards now and then with a group of ladies. We’re not serious enough to mind our bids at Bridge, so we play Progressive Rummy, which allows us plenty of spare brainpower to converse the whole time.

One day I noticed the hands, of the players not of cards, which rested around the table. They were hard-working hands, caring hands, hands that wiped and typed and baked and scoured and untied knots and knitted. I felt a moment of satisfaction that our hands were our common ground, our bond.

Try it sometime and see for yourself. Just look at hands and see what they have to say.

Fabulous Fakes

Being female, of course I’ve tried the fake fingernails solution. Oh, sure I look glam for an evening out with those pricey painted faux fingertips. Layer upon layer of silk and lacquer sanded and buffed to glossy perfection. And I admit that I feel a bit proud the next day when I flash those French Manicured beauties as I reach for my Doppio Espresso on the barista’s counter or sign my name at the bank teller’s window.

But alas, the maintenance of that lovely fiction, those fingernail falsies, requires far more effort than I am willing to expend. As much as I love the gentle administrations of the Vietnamese ladies at my local nail salon, the weekly appointments inhaling chemicals and dust –I can’t believe that this process was good for any of us.

When it was time to pull the fake nails off, after soaking them in a skin scorching bath of 100 proof acetone, my fragile nails lost yet another layer of strength. They were reduced to a condition as soft and pliable as the pink ovals of a newborn baby.

Seven Tips on Sore Fingers

So, if you’re like me, with fingernails that are your weakest link,

1. Buff them gently to smooth off the offending ridges.

2. Slather on rich gooey hand cream and nail oil to soothe the cracking dryness.

3. Eat the greenest and leafiest foods you can stand.

4. Apply some SPF protection then get some sun on those painful paws.

5. Alternate ice and heat with massage to soothe aching tendons.

6. Swallow those calcium tablets and multi-vitamins the size of Mini Coopers.

7. Drink buckets of water daily. You’ll spend so much time in the bathroom that no one notices your nails any longer.  They’ll just think you have a bladder problem!

Corduroy finger nails. A little bit of trigger finger. How bad can that be? It’s a bond that I share with my ancestors, right?

So, what about those oily brown age spots creeping into view?  If you have any remedies, my hands are all ears!

Tags: connection, fingers, hands, midlife, noticing, pain, smile, solutions, sore, sore fingers and hands, whole body