Hands, traintracks, and penny-candy

I am staring at my hands. There is a black stain on my right middle finger from my writing all my Merry-late-Christmas-cards. In a romantic way it reminds me of Joe in the book little women I think my fingers shrink when they are cold and dehydrated. I can tell they're dehydrated because when I press on the tip of one, the dent stays for a while.....a long sip of water....I could look at hands forever. Especially other people's hands. I think you can tell a lot about a person from their hands. And what role do nails play?
My Grandma's hands have long fingers and thinly veiled veins, but when you hold them you feel the callouses of years of hard work, scrubbing, cooking etc. We went to Ohio, to visit her over Christmas. I loved it. I swear she makes the best cinnamon roles ever. And of course we got to see cousins and participated in the traditional smashing of pennies on the nearby train tracks. There's a thrill when those striped poles come down and you hear the trains whistle...and then it is suddenly thundering by shaking the ground beneath you. And then of course we search for those flattened pieces of copper. The older ones have lead inside so that when the are smashed there is a thin line of silver on the outside of the copper oval.
My Grandma's crazy. She is one of the few people that can be entirely conservative and yet very adventurous at the same time. She once went on a Cruise to Alaska with my great aunt. The act like little girls together...giggling etc...but they had to convince her to wear a pearl necklace when they took their picture with the captain. :)
We volunteered with her at the thrift store where she works and at night drove through a park filled with Christmas lights...fountains and moving animals and there was one barn with lights that blinked to the tune on a certain radio station. Kaytlin and Mom and I explored graveyards...Kayt and I found the oldest gravestones...and were quite scandalized to find that some ALIVE people had actually already had their plot of land and a gravestone. "PUUULEASE! I'm totally letting later generations worry about what to do with my body." Which preceded a rather morbid discussion in which I upheld the romance of having one's ashes scattered with flower petals in some sparkling river or floating on a bed of flowers with a white dress on some canoe over a water fall....and Kaytlin upheld in explicit detail the entire grossness of the whole thing.
We went caroling and us kids skipped over to the one remaining penny-candy store I know of...but alas! It is no longer a penny-candy store...now the cheapest is 2 cents! We watched lots of television to make up for our utter lack of television at home and we laughed a lot.

And now I am home...with the delicious pine smell of the tree and the biting cold and the smell of the wood smoke from our chimney. It's so beautiful...but I am still moving south "when I grow up." And despite my cold hands I hope you to are having a warm, sweet, red-bow, pine-smelling, chimney-smoke Christmas.


Yours truly,
butterfly girl