Body of Work

Please allow me to introduce myself

“Your hands are soft.” My cousin Kelly told me, rubbing her fingers across my palms. Her sister Stacey looked at them with disgust. Kelly was fifteen and Stacey was fourteen. I was ten years old. 

My mom left my dad and took me and my sisters to live with her parents on the farm. Her brother, Uncle Kenny, along with his wife, Aunt Dar and daughters Kelly and Stacey, ran the farm, a working dairy, with Holsteins and Jerseys. They lived down the road in a small house Uncle Kenny built when he married Aunt Dar. The hot water was the right knob and the cold water, the left, on both kitchen and bathroom sinks. It was a small cluttered house with wood-panelling and furniture just a touch too large. No animals were allowed inside except my uncle’s cat Whiskers who would sit on his lap when he could finally sit after work and farm chores and smoke his pipe. My mom and sisters and I lived with my grandparents in the old farmhouse right by the barn. 

My grandparents were first generation farmers. My grandfather took to purchasing animals until they got kicked out of the suburbs. One horse was charming, the cow too far. They found a farmhouse and acreage north in Baltimore County. It’s a beautiful house, white shutters, a periwinkle blue wrap-around porch, large but not cavernous. Two floors and a basement I was always too fearful to venture down to, and a small attic I also avoided. It smelled like lavender, cedar, the soft plush toilet paper my grandmother bought, and that inexplicable medicinal elderly scent, Vaseline and Vick’s Vapor Rub perhaps. My grandparents slept in the former living room to avoid stairs and we were on the second floor. 

Looking back, my cousins did everything older cousins are supposed to do. They told ghost stories about a man who lived in barn where the hay was stored, how the abandoned church down the road was actually a center for satanic rituals and rented all the horror movies from the video store. They were exemplary examples of proper cussing and spun tales about boys and men and how bodies come together. They introduced me to Prince, David Bowie and ZZ Top, Flashdance, Dirty Dancing and Purple Rain. My cousins told me the previous owner of the house hung himself from the big tree right outside the kitchen window where we ate cinnamon toast and drank Tang every morning.

We are not sentimental people. 

My hands were too soft. I was soft. This isn’t some coming of age story. It’s just important to know when your hands are too soft, and what it takes to get rid of this cursed condition. The most work I had done before was shoveling snow and washing rocks glasses at my dad’s bar. No lipstick traces on my watch. I was game for any chore on the farm--carrying buckets of water, bales of straw and hay, pushing the grain down the chute, giving bottles to the calves, weighing pails of milk and dumping them in the tank, cleaning the dairy. I needed to prove myself. My cousins were pleased I did so much of their work they grew to actually like me. 

I got strong, real strong, catching my body right at the time it was changing the most. I split my shoulders with work and was rewarded stretch marks atop them. My hands were wide, and finally calloused. I still didn’t know how to drive stick, but I liked cows and wasn’t afraid of hard work or manure or the heat or the cold. 

I was tough because I had to be tough. There wasn’t another choice. I had to prove my worth in my new home. I started from scratch, soaking up all the information about the animals, how to move them, milk them and feed them. I learned to warm the frozen water pump by rubbing gloved hands back and forth on it, how a kerchief tied over my nose and mouth would help while I dug out the pens full of shit hardened over the years. I found out how powerful iodine is for treating infections, how to halter-break a calf and to do it sooner rather than later, how to call for cats for feeding and track a missing herd when they break through the electric fencing during a heatwave (they’re probably at the creek). I understood what made one udder better than another, how to tell if milk should be mixed in the tank or tossed in the driveway and if a cow got in the chives. I popped grubs out of cows’ sides, flushed maggots from infected wounds, coaxed crusty mucus out of kittens’ eyes so they could open and found the lost mother birthing her calf in the brush. I learned the difference between timothy and straw, the light sweetness of scent and lilting texture that separates the former from the latter. I picked up on how to see a cow, her future, her worth, her longevity, it’s in the legs, the top line, the udder attachments. I rose at 4 am to milk when beckoned because my cousins didn’t come home. I broke up fights between them in the parlor when no one else was around. I learned how to take a horn in the hip and a kick to the stomach. 

My hands got hard. The metal from the water buckets cutting into my palms, the twine holding straw bales together rubbing against my skin, the rough wood from the shovel, the coarse hair on the cows, lifting the pails of milk to the hook scale that was high for my ten year old height, the sun, the wind, the cold, the heat, the moon, the stars, the cows, the dogs, the cats, the heifers, the calves, they all had a say in how my hands felt and changed their course.

Now I’m a cook. Cooking, another field with a disdain for soft hands. They tell people you have no experience, that you can’t hold your own, the same way my little hands spoke to my cousins. There’s the callous you build on the index finger of your dominant hand from holding your knife, just under the second knuckle facing the thumb. The pads of the palms get tough, from the same things as the farm, hot handles, cold water, gripping hotel pans, holding heavy things that want to slip, repeated exposure to flames that slower cauterize the skin. 

It’s best when the hands feel nothing. 

I worked in kitchens because it suited me, physically and mentally. I made choices, to stay away from macho kitchens, to seek out places with a culture that meant something to me. We use the word culture a lot these days when it comes to kitchens, it’s generally a gesture. For me it meant a place where I am appreciated and hopefully respected, where the food isn’t bullshit in my book (meaning super fussy or beautiful but empty) and comes from actual people who care and when there’s music, it’s good. If I was going to put my heart and soul into something with terrible pay, horrible hours and no benefits, then that place better be a good one to wile away my future. 

Just like working on the farm, I enjoyed the tactile, hands-on nature of work and how the exhaustion didn’t allow my brain to run. I liked having a different relationship with my body, a positive, functional one. Hard physical work gives me a different relationship to my body, it is for lifting, pushing and pulling. I like it when my hands don’t feel. I like the work ethic I learned from a young age but there are days it is a curse.  My hands used to be soft. That was a long time ago.