The truth about my hands is that they're small, but not fragile; in fact, they are strong. And there is nothing, I mean nothing dainty about them. My fingernails can be described as "spatulate," and how I've always hated that word! It means that they are broad and flat. They are also thin and pliable, but not as a result of malnourishment [oh no]; they are merely fine, like my hair. I suppose that could qualify as dainty, because I always wish I had a man's help extracting knife blades—yes, I know; extracting knife blades is not dainty at all. And my hands can be cold as ice. I've always been self-conscious of this, though it seems now that I've found the cause. When I drink coffee, they get cold. When I am happy, they aren't. I know that's apples-to-oranges, but such is life. I almost never paint my fingernails, for numerous reasons, the main being that my hands are for sculpting in clay and kneading dough and making pastry and cutting things out with scissors. Nail polish gets in the way. As you can probably guess, I don’t like it when it chips off—particularly into pastry. The truth about my hands is that they are a grown-up child's hands, and I haven’t always liked them, but something happened to me before I turned thirty, with things that had previously seemed “wrong” or “imperfect” redefining themselves as merely “mine.” [More apples and oranges, I know.] So it is not about how I judge my hands; it is about how much I owe them, and about how good they are at getting the job done. Possibly, my hands are looking more and more like what I imagine my mother's hands must have been like when I was a little girl [but all that is, of course, not for words].

pardon the poor quality of the photo - but this is purely an illustrative photo.

This is an example of what overgrown forests look like (on the left) and what a properly thinned out forest looks like (on the right)

Overgrowth has occurred because of fire suppression efforts. When no brush fires sweep through the land, little saplings grow as best as they can, but due to the dense nature of their growth pattern and the fact that none of them get burned away by brush fires (that we put out), they form a sort of step ladder to the canopy.

this is important because when a brush fire actually does get past the wildland fire fighters (and they do) it takes this conveninent ste ladder all the way up to the canopy. And now that it's in the canopy, it not only kills all of the little saplings like normal, but it kills he old growth as well, effectivelyy destroying the entire forest.... it's nature's "reset" button. So the forest will grow back, but not before all the current root systems die and rot away, leading to massive erosion and habitat loss.

Projects like this thinning one that I was a part of through the Coconino Rural Environment Corps aim to stop that by cutting out the overcrowded step ladder and re-introducing brush fires.