The cold and snow may be missing from this winter but one other seasonal staple is not: cracked and often bleeding hand skin.
When I was a boy, my mother told me I had such parched hands because I did not dry them thoroughly enough after washing them. For my mother, a problem was usually the fault of the person who experienced it. It would never have occurred to her that my dry skin was the result of the desert-low humidity of Minnesota winters. On the flip side, any challenge a person faced could be solved if that person acted properly. If you had a sore throat, for example, you merely had to gargle with warm salt water. Problem solved. Is this human-centric way of looking at our lives pessimistic (it is all our fault) or optimistic (we can solve most if not all of our problems by following simple remedies)?
One thing I can say for sure: this way of thinking is annoying. I rang in my childhood New Years as I do today: with hands as dry as mummy skin, and all the time thinking it was due to shoddy towel use. How much better if Mom had saved the guilt and taught me the value of hand lotion.
Such a strange way of thinking, especially from a woman who never once saw a doctor after I was born, her youngest child. And she lived another 38 years. Mom had problems walking the last five years of her life but refused to get a checkup. Her legs were her weakness, she said, laughing off every medical urging of her children. If she had half the faith in her own capacity to fix problems as she did in the capacity of her kids she may have caught the blocked coronary arteries before they killed her.
But we are all strange beasts. Unsightly winter hands and self-delusion are the least of our blemishes.
