Fingernails

A Poe-umm

My fingernails are chipped
and they always look dirty
even tho’ they are clean, 
no matter how hard I scrub them.
The cuticles are a ragged mess
and I have a hangnail (again.)
There’s ground in dirt on the 
side of my finger and the pad of 
my thumb from weeding in the garden 
without gloves. 
They’re right there in my garden basket — 
I just prefer to feel the earth, 
feel the life — 
the living soil.
Some of that ground in grime can be 
paint or ink from the latest art project.
My hands will tell you (clean or dirty)
that I am not afraid to work hard. 
Apparently, that troubled some people — 
the looks, the cringes. 
I’ve had friends insist, 
“You need a manicure!” 
One chick I knew in college convinced me 
to let her put on fake nails. 
Yeah, they were cool — a novelty for the 
night out dancing and drinking with my friends. 
I loved how my hands became weaponized, 
perfect should some dude get fresh.
Give him something to lie about —
(“Dude, what happened to your face?”
“Uhhhh — dude, I got so drunk, I fell into a pricker bush.”
“Did you get her number?”)
Well, I’ll tell you,
that “girls’ night project” 
went the way of things as soon as I
was in the studio, turpentine melted them — 
a catastrophic loss of awesome claws.
I wasted more time picking that crap off than making art. 
“Oh my gawd, what did you do?”
The chick was pissed because they were expensive. 
Well, honey, don’t waste your money on me — 
I’m not a girly girl.
Never will be. You can dress me up, 
but you can’t take me out. 
I have tried, but it’s hard. 
To be honest, I never cared
about how my fingernails looked. 
In my experience, 
the very second that I notice them or 
dare to admire them for looking 
rather nice, I know they’re doomed. 
Within minutes of this “noticing” 
or, at the most, by the next morning, 
they break, snag, tear, get bent back
(OUCH, I hate when that happens!) 
and there’s another hangnail (infected, of course.)
My hands, my fingernails. My life —
Thankfully, I’m not hanging by my fingernails.
It’s all good.

It is true—my hands and my fingernails are a mess. (I remember those old commercials, Madge the manicurist using Palmolive dish soap to soak her client's hands in—man, they’d do anything to sell a product, don’t they?) I look at my hands now at 61 years old and see them looking very much like my mother’s hands, though I don’t have large, inflamed knuckles like hers. (Her fingers were crooked with arthritis at a young age.) She knitted and painted to keep them limber—she warned me not to crack my knuckles or my fingers would end up looking like hers, but I would crack them anyway but didn’t make it a habit.

I went through phases like all girls do—fussing over makeup, nail polish, sunbathing to get tan (I’m so fair-skinned, I freckle and burn), and then the clothes—creating a “look.” I tended to go contrary to the flow with my funky thrift shop clothes or whatever I could find that wasn’t like something anybody else would wear—“I wouldn’t be caught dead in that.” All right, I’ll wear it. (Yes, there were things I wouldn’t be caught dead in—I’ll save that for another poe-umm that is yet to be written.) And no matter how hard I tried, my frizzy, flyaway, static-filled hair would never ever look like Farrah Fawcett’s hair. I was well into my twenties when I gave up and learned to be comfortable with the vessel I live in. So my fingernails—they look pretty good today—I know before the day is out, I’ll wreck ‘em cuz I noticed them. It never takes me long to mess up my hands; if it isn’t garden dirt, it’s donkey dust, or graphite smudges, ink, or paint—whatever I get my hands involved with throughout the day, I’ll be sure to decorate them accordingly!

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