Winter Weather Skin Burns

Yesterday I was standing in line at the pharmacy, waiting to get my prescription. Nothing is fast anymore in this depressed economy. Even when we pay cash, we still have to wait a long time.

The person in front of me was a young woman, in her twenties, holding a bottle of Gold Bond lotion. She was picking up a prescription as well. A young man with a small boy, about five or six years old, approached her.

The little boy had silent tears streaking down his face and showed his mother his hands which appeared red across, resembling a burn. She asked him gently which one hurt worse and he said, “both.” She gave him a kiss on his forehead and he left with his dad to sit in a row of waiting chairs.

Moved by the little boy’s silent pain, the grandmother in me asked her if he burned himself. I knew that Chef’s Burn would have taken care of that but she said that this happens to him every winter.

I suggested to her to use Aquaphor and to put some light cotton gloves without fingers on his hands at night so he does not wipe off the Aquaphor on his clothes. She agreed that it was a great idea and thanked me.

I felt deeply sorry for the little boy. A flash of my childhood memories crossed my brain, playing in the deep snow and the single digit temperatures when our hands turned beet red from the intense cold, ice, wind, and snow cutting into our delicate, young skin. And our mothers had nothing to give us to soothe the pain except lard. The commies could find lanolin cream and Nivea cream in their private stores but the rest of us were not so lucky.

Did that trouble deter us from sledding, skating, and snowball fights? Of course not. After hours of play outside, the cold froze the superficial epidermal pain and we ignored the eventual misery. Once we went inside and thawed out, we were crying in pain, pain made much worse by water and heat. And the skin would eventually crack from the intense winter weather burns.

The burned skin did not limit just to our hands, the ankles and face were affected too. There was no Aquaphor for our pain. We had to deal with it, and cry ourselves to sleep, slathered in lard.

Such was our childhood under the communist boot - painful but punctuated by temporary happiness and innocent play.