So I was wandering around outside today, doing various things related to work, when I realized my hands were cold. It wasn’t crazy cold out, or snowing, or even raining – just cold enough that my hands kept getting cold and stiff. When the body feels as though it is being threatening existentially by the cold, it quits keeping the extremities warm and concentrates on making sure the core and the organs are warm enough for it to stay alive. That’s great, but you know you have to ask yourself what kind of crappy climate do I live in when a regular outing forces your body’s survival mechanisms to make dire life-and-death decisions several times a day? And we are pretty warm in comparison to most of this country. We may get used to it, but inside my head there is a siren going off and my brain is ordering the system to leave the hands to die each time I’m outside for a few minutes.
I read that cold hands and feet can also be caused by iron deficiency and some other diseases, so maybe I should take this seriously? At my age I am trying to resist becoming a raging hypochondriac, and it isn’t always easy. Every little chest pain is the Final Jammer getting started; each headache is an aneurism winding up to pop my brain; every little pain is a new, spreading cancer. I try to be brave and not alarm those around me, but I am quietly preparing myself for the worst, overreacting to stimuli much like the systems that would throw my hands overboard to keep my organs cozy.
If my hands fell off, my whole system would have bigger survival problems than cool weather, that’s for sure – like making it difficult to eat organ meat to lessen my iron deficiency.
I see my grandparents’ house was finally torn down last week. It’s amazing it lasted as long as it did. It was one of the last original houses left in the neighbourhood, and without a doubt the one that was in the worst condition. I spent decades on that property, playing as a child, being an idiot mostly as a teen, then bringing my children there as an adult. But its time was due. I was sad when I saw the churned up ground where the house had been, and I was surprised at how small the yard seemed now. The guy who rented the house after my grandpa died said he thought it was haunted, almost certainly from my grandma who died in the house. My story “Moving On,” which I put on here (October 2021) was about her and the boarded up wreck the house had become. I hope she has moved on and found some peace. She had a beautiful magnolia tree in the corner of the property that they must have planted soon after moving in around 1959. My uncle said one time he had thought about applying to have it protected as a heritage tree, but I see it has no protective fence around it, and it has the same little nailed-on tag as the other trees, all getting cut down to make way for some huge eyesore house. I broke a few branches off the magnolia, and I will try to find some way to propagate them to keep it alive. I want to share them with my sister who will have better odds of making it happen than me, as she has a yard full of trees to graft on to and a way with such things that passed me by.
And so it goes, the world jettisons the unnecessary: the old house on the block of shiny new mansions, and the hands and feet trying to hog all the warm blood.