Barnyard Balm Soothes Hands In an Odd Way

It’s rubber-glove season again. As soon as the outdoor temperature drops, I start wearing rubber gloves to wash dishes and scour the sinks.
From April through November, I usually can plunge my bare hands into any sink full of dirty dishes with no difficulty. (Except at my mother-in-law’s house; she uses hotter water to wash dishes than she uses to make tea.) But when the house has to be closed up for the winter, the cracks on my hands open up and I suffer.
So, I wear rubber gloves to avoid dishpan hands so sore that even Madge on the Palmolive dish-washing detergent commercials can’t cure them.
Most winters, I go through a couple of pairs of rubber gloves. A gloved finger will spring a leak after a fork pierces it, or one glove will get lost in the abyss under the kitchen sink.
On occasions when I’ve been desperate to clean the kitchen and I haven’t been able to locate a non-leaking pair of gloves, I’ve worn a right-handed glove on my left hand. This works fine as long as I’m washing stew kettles and not crystal stemware.
I will wear leaky gloves, if that’s all I can find. I would rather have water seep through a little tear than plunge my hands into a sink full of hot water. However, it does give me the creeps to stick my hands into soggy gloves.
I don’t really like wearing rubber gloves. My fingernails get cleaner without them. At least that’s what I tell my kids when I want them to do the dishes.
I take a lot of physical and verbal grief over my winter hand condition. When I was young, my mother made me put glycerin on my hands and sleep wearing little, white-cotton church gloves.
When I was in high school, my Dad got involved. He was worried about my chapped feet. (I insisted on walking to school wearing shoes and nylon stockings.) He got some pork tallow from a butcher and had me lather my feet with the tallow before I went to bed.
The next morning, my feet were nice and soft but they smelled like pig fat - which is not the way a high school girl attracts dates.
I don’t have chapped feet anymore. And I don’t soothe my hands with glycerin. Instead, I lather up at night with bag balm, which is used to soften the udders of milking cows. (Another barnyard remedy; however, this one doesn’t smell). I cover my hands with knee-high athletic socks and climb in bed.
I may look odd, but it doesn’t matter – except on nights I have to exert authority. One night, I stormed from bed to the top of the basement stairs with the intention of lecturing a rowdy throng of teen-agers gathered below.
As I completed my “That’s enough carrying on for tonight” speech and turned around, clad in my pink flannel nightgown, I heard one of the teens ask incredulously, “Does your mom have socks on her hands?”
They can make fun of me if they choose, but this treatment does work. I just have to remember when I get up in the morning to walk on my feet instead of my hands.
December 3, 1991