Oh Man, I Have Hands!

My husband shows me the back of his hand. “40,” he says. He pulls the skin until all the little wrinkles and saggy parts are pulled tight and says, “20.” He giggles at himself. I push the skin of his hand together until it is a mass of  wrinkles and say, “60.” He rolls his eyes at me. After he’s gone, I look at the skin of my hands. Definitely 40.  I also realize with great horror that my mother’s hands have somehow, mysteriously, become attached to my arms.

My mother spent her 30th birthday in the bed. Hers was the generation taught never to trust anyone past the dread age of 30 and she suddenly found herself unable to hang onto 29 any longer. I vaguely remember her puffy face and rumbled Pjs as she headed back to her bedroom and shut the door.

30 didn’t bother me at all.

35 hit me like an evil tornado from the sky, bent on sucking my house off its very foundation. Suddenly, I was “mid-thirties,” not “early-thirties” or, even “late-twenties,” but  “MID-THIRTIES.” The notion of it reminded me of hair stuck in a drain.  So, I figured that 40 wouldn’t be much of a big deal, I’d already had my  middle age “come apart," so how bad could it be?

I vividly remember my mother’s 40th birthday. We’d come home from church and her friends were all waiting in the kitchen for her surprise party. I studied the look on her face-the shock that turned quickly to understanding and then to joy as the realization sunk in of why all those people were crammed in next to the trash compactor-  and I couldn’t get over how very OLD she was. Old, like gonna die in her sleep any minute old, old like her name and “sex“ just could not go in the same sentence old, old like never gonna happen to me!!! old.

It has. And, I’m healthy and I still have sex (ahem, great sex!) and her hands have grown onto the ends of my arms. It’s true. I had noticed it but the truth of it was hammered into my consciousness when Oldest Child, riding next to me in the truck, looked down and exclaimed,

  “Mom, your hands look 

JUST LIKE Meme’s hands!"

I know why I‘ve sprouted these hands. I mean, besides genetics, why. Mom worked in the yard constantly, until her hands grew freckled and tough and the nails were worn down.  I spend every moment that I can at the barn, outside, in the hot sun and the rain and the cold, doing barn things. Sometimes, I plop my dirty hands onto my steering wheel on the drive home from the barn and contemplate what I’d give up to have young pretty flesh, again.








One thing that I’d have to give up to regain my nice pretty flesh is my time spent outside at the barn-the sun and wind and dirt and the work do not “Dawn, No More Dishpan Hands” make. And, I don't want to give up my barn time. It’s, honestly, the only time that I feel truly alive. I am a bit ashamed to admit that. I have a husband and several kids and the only time I feel truly alive is when I’m with a horse, preferably my Horse.

My people need me. My time at the barn is not about something that I have to do, it’s about who I am while I’m doing what I do.  At the barn, I am independent and capable and …ageless.  Perhaps, I am a bit of an adrenaline junky, if it weren’t horses, it’d be motorcycles or skydiving or rock climbing. I just want to  (nod to Bon Jovi) “live while I’m alive.”  I don’t want to be one of those people who sit in front of the computer all day and, then, the TV all night. I’d rather be too busy doing stuff to watch other people doing stuff. No reality show on Tv is worth missing my life for.

Okay, okay, okay, I admit it, it’s for the horse smell, too. Oh lord, help me, that smell! There is nothing else in the world like that smell-subtle, earthy and musky, like an expensive perfume. I swear, some days Horse smells so good that I feel like I should call my husband, alone with the kids at home, and apologize.