Last night just after sunset I saw the decade’s first new moon among the trees behind our house, a beautiful sharp sliver of silver like a bright fingernail in the dark sky. The rest of the moon’s sphere was barely visible, looking like a soft charcoal ball hanging there, but what I ended up focusing on was that shining fingernail of light. There is always something special about catching the new moon, because it is there for such a short time that first night and because the clear western sky provides some sense of promise, though I’m not always sure what that promise is.
When our granddaughter E., who is just past two and a half, visits, or when we go to her house, she always shows me her fingernails. They are tiny and delicate, and sometimes they have colour on them. Lately it has been pink and green, alternated, though much of that nail polish has disappeared by now, and she did explain to me that one little patch of turquoise is marker. Then she asks to look at mine.
She is particularly interested in my two middle fingers, not because they are the “rude” ones, but because the nail on each has been injured. The injuries are called subungual, because they are under the nail. This does not make us ungulates (from ungula, meaning hoof, claw, talon), like the hoofed intruders mentioned in my last post, but it does suggest a connection between us and them, though we did evolve nails instead of hooves. E. checks them both out carefully and sometimes asks me if I need a band-aid (I don’t). I appreciate her interest because I have been fairly interested in them myself, especially in the one on my right hand.
The left one was pretty straightforward. Somewhere in the process of moving the firewood from the pile in the yard into the shed back in September, it got injured. I don’t even know how or when it happened, I just noticed the purple colour under my nail one day. There was no pain that I was aware of and nothing to do with it I figured, except to wait for it to grow out, which it is doing.
The right one was a more serious or significant event, though it didn’t seem that it should have been. I was working with my brother Ken laying stones in crusher dust to build the walkway. The day was cool and the dust was cold and wet, which may perhaps have softened up my nail for the injury. At any rate I was laying a flat piece of ironstone (I still know which one), not too big and not too heavy, but my finger underneath it, specifically the nail of that finger, was pressed hard onto a lump of gravel hidden under the crusher dust, and it hurt!
If you have had it happen, you will know what I mean. You end up with bleeding under the nail and pressure from the blood there. It took me two days of a seriously throbbing finger to realize that I needed someone to do something about it (read the instructions here), so a nice doctor put a small hole in my nail and pushed out a bunch of blood through that hole.
It was much better, and I believed (naively, I expect) that I might keep the nail. I kept it clean and hoped. A few weeks later I realized my hope was in vain as a small gust of wind caught the nail when I took my hand out of my jacket pocket and blew it right off my finger. I retrieved it, because I thought the little slit in it was pretty neat, but then decided that keeping it might be a little perverse, especially since my body was already hard at work making a new one, so I threw it away.
Now I am waiting and watching as the new nail slowly grows in. The rounded end of my finger reminds me of someone in my class back in junior high who chewed his nails so severely that they bled and only the nail beds seemed to remain. It still feels weird not having a whole nail there, but presumably that will change, and the new nail will grow in as if nothing untoward happened out there in the walkway. If it does, E. will be able to check and see a whole new nail there, perhaps even before she turns three!
I remember the summer when both of the toenails on my big toes were gone. A result of playing a game of road hockey too fiercely while wearing too tight shoes on an employee wellness day. Funny, huh? I knew something was wrong when I walked to the car and felt my toes throbbing. I remember when the first nail came off. Shauna and I were visiting and our whole family had gone to Chris and Hiya's for the day. I had been wiggling the nail for part of the day and then as I was bouncing on the trampoline, my toe landed funny and all of the sudden my nail was off my toe and bouncing around beneath me. Strange to be disconnected. I worried about the toe bed, but the nail did grow back. In memory, though, it seemed glacial.
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