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A woman in the seat next to me at a community-college pottery class told me, very casually, why her hands had stopped bothering her.

I went home that night and thought about it for a week.

I am sixty-four years old. My name is Patricia, but I have been Pat to everyone I love since I was about six.

I retired three years ago from the regional library system in our part of central Ohio, where I had been a children's librarian for thirty-one years.

My husband, Doug, retired the year after me from the maintenance department of the city schools, where he had been the head of operations.

We have one daughter, who lives in Columbus with her own family, and three grandchildren we see most weekends.

We live in the same house we have lived in for thirty-six years, on a quiet street with old maples and neighbors who have mostly been here as long as we have.

I am telling you all of that because the story I want to tell you is small, and small stories are easier to follow if you know who the small story is happening to.

I started having achy hands about five years ago.

It was not a sudden thing. None of this has been a sudden thing.

It started the way these things start — one morning I noticed my hands felt a little stiff when I went to open a jar of peach preserves at breakfast.

I have been opening jars for fifty years. I noticed the stiffness because the jar took two tries instead of one, and because the second try involved my whole shoulder in a way that the first try used to handle on its own.

I did not think much of it.

I am a librarian, after all, and I had read enough about getting older to know that hands stiffen a little at sixty. I thought about it for the rest of the morning and then I forgot about it for almost a year.

Over the course of that year, though, I noticed it again. And then again. And then more often than that.

By the time I was sixty-one, I was waking up in the morning with hands that took about half an hour to feel like my hands.

I was reaching for jars two-handed.

I was finding that the small repetitive tasks of a life — knitting, which I have done since I was twelve, and the small bits of mending that come up when you live in an old house, and the dishes after a Sunday dinner with twelve people — were each leaving me with a quiet ache that lingered into the next morning.

I went to my doctor about it at my annual physical.

She is a careful woman, my doctor, in her early fifties, and she has been our family doctor since our daughter was in middle school.

She examined my hands. She asked me a number of careful questions. She ran some additional bloodwork.

She looked at the results and told me what she always tells me when she tells me good news — that everything was in the ranges she wanted to see it in.

She told me my hands looked, to her examination, like the hands of a sixty-one-year-old woman who had been using them carefully for sixty-one years.

She told me there was nothing she would treat at this stage, that this was the kind of thing many women her age and mine live with, and that she would keep an eye on it.

She was right. I want to say that clearly.

She was right that there was nothing to treat, and she was right to be conservative, and I do not have a complaint about how she handled the conversation. She did her job well.

But.

She had told me my numbers were in the ranges she wanted. She had told me there was nothing she would treat. She had told me I was, in every clinical sense, fine.

And I had gone home from that appointment to the same house with the same jars of preserves and the same knitting basket and the same dishes after Sunday dinner, and the achy hands were still my achy hands, and they were going to keep being achy hands, and the medical conversation about them was apparently over.

This is the gap I want to tell you about.

The gap between the chart is fine and the body that I live in still hurts in small ways that I have started to plan my days around.

It is a particularly quiet gap to live in, because there is no acute problem to solve and no one to complain to about it.

You learn to use both hands on the jar. You learn to do the knitting in smaller sessions. You learn to keep the dishes for the next morning.

You adjust.

I adjusted for two more years.

The achy hands stayed about the same.

The achy hands were joined, eventually, by an achy left hip that talked to me when I got out of the car after a long drive, and an achy lower back that talked to me when I worked in the garden for more than an hour.

By the time I was sixty-three I had three quiet conversations going on with three different parts of my body, and they had all of them become part of the daily texture of my life.

I want to be clear that none of this stopped me from doing anything.

I gardened. I knitted. I took the grandchildren to the park. I helped my daughter with the things she needed help with. I traveled with my husband. I lived my life.

The aches were just there, all the time, in the background, like the hum of an old refrigerator.

The thing I want to tell you about happened in the fall, about a year and a half ago, at the community-college pottery class I had signed up for partly because I had always wanted to and partly because my daughter had suggested it as something that might be good for my hands.

The reasoning was that pottery would keep my hands warm and moving and engaged, and that the instructor would be able to teach me techniques that did not strain the small joints.

My daughter is thoughtful in this particular way. I love her for it.

The class was on Tuesday evenings, in a basement studio at the community college fifteen minutes from our house. There were eleven of us — mostly women, mostly in our fifties or sixties, the kind of people who sign up for a pottery class on a Tuesday evening in the fall.

I sat next to a woman I had not met before.

Her name was Joan. She was, I would guess, sixty-eight or so, and she had silver hair pulled back in a long braid and the kind of hands that told you, before she said anything, that she had been working with them for a long time.

We exchanged the small pleasantries you exchange with the woman at the next wheel on the first night of a pottery class.

We learned each other's names. We talked about the grandchildren. We talked about whether either of us had done pottery before, which neither of us had.

We agreed, partway through the first session, that we were both terrible at centering the clay — which is the first thing you have to learn and which is genuinely much harder than it looks.

It was around the third or fourth class that I mentioned, in passing, that my hands had been bothering me a little more than usual that week.

I said it almost as an apology — I had been making a worse mess than usual at the wheel — and Joan looked over at my hands and asked, in the gentle way some older women ask things, how long my hands had been bothering me.

I told her. The abridged version: five years, started small, got steadier, three quiet conversations now with three different parts of my body, doctor said nothing to treat, I had adjusted.

She nodded. She did not interrupt me while I was telling it.

When I was finished, she said: I had the same conversation about my hands with my own doctor about four years ago, and my answer to it was about the same as yours.

I asked her what she meant.

She said: I adjusted. I learned to live with it.

And then she said something that I have been thinking about ever since.

She said: About three years ago, I started taking one small thing in the mornings — a beetroot capsule, of all things — and I want to be careful about what I say to you about it, because I do not want to overstate anything, but I have been doing it for three years now, and somewhere in the second year I noticed that my hands had stopped being the first conversation I had with my body every morning.

They are still my hands. They are still sixty-eight years old. They still talk to me when I have been doing something with them for a long time.

But the morning conversation is different than it used to be.

She told me she had not changed anything else about her life.

She told me she was still on the same prescriptions she had been on for years — a low-dose blood pressure medication and something for her thyroid — and that she had specifically called her pharmacist before she added the beetroot, to ask whether it would play nicely with what she was already taking.

Her pharmacist had told her it would, and to keep doing what she was doing.

She told me the small company she had been buying it from is called Rosabella, that she had picked it because they cold-pressed the beetroot at low temperatures rather than processing it with heat, and that she had been ordering the same bottle every six weeks for three years.

She said it casually.

She was not selling me anything. She was a woman at the next wheel telling me what she had been doing, the way women that age tell you things — without performance, just the facts of a life.

I went home that night and told my husband about it.

He asked me what I was going to do.

I told him I was going to think about it.

I thought about it for a week. Then I started reading.

I read for almost three weeks.

I am a librarian — was a librarian — and reading carefully is what I do.

I read about beetroot. I read about the deep crimson pigment called betalain — the color that stains your cutting board for three days — and about the dietary nitrates that are naturally present in the root.

I read about the long, patient relationship the research community has had with this vegetable for decades, in the context of supporting healthy circulation, supporting cardiovascular wellness, and supporting the body's own natural inflammatory response, in people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in.

None of what I read was a fireworks story.

It was the opposite of one.

It was the kind of careful, slowly built body of evidence that I, as a librarian, recognized — the kind that comes from researchers who are not making outlandish claims and who are content to let the work accumulate over a long time.

I picked Rosabella, the brand Joan had mentioned, and I picked it for the reason she had given and for one other reason I came to on my own.

The reason Joan had given was the cold-press.

The betalain pigment is heat-sensitive. That is the chemistry of the molecule. If you process beetroot the standard way, with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat.

Rosabella decided to cold-press the root at low temperatures because they wanted as much of the compound as possible to make it from the field into the capsule.

That is a slower way to make a supplement, and at my age I have come to pay attention to the small decisions companies make when no one is watching, because those decisions tell you everything.

The reason I came to on my own was the simplicity.

Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water.

I am sixty-four. I have grandchildren and a garden and a knitting basket and a husband who likes his breakfast on the table at the same time every morning.

I am not interested in a protocol that requires its own shelf.

Before I started taking it, I called my pharmacist.

I called him because that is what Joan had done, and because the doctor and the pharmacist between them are the people who know what is on my chart, and I am not the kind of woman who adds anything to her morning routine without asking.

The pharmacist's name is Stephen and he has been at the small independent pharmacy in our town for the better part of twenty years.

I told him what I was thinking about adding. I told him about the over-the-counter pain reliever I take some mornings when my hands are particularly stiff.

He pulled up my profile, looked at the small things I am on — a thyroid medication I have been on since my mid-fifties, and the over-the-counter — and told me he had no concerns about adding a beetroot supplement in capsule form.

He told me to keep doing what I was doing on the medication side.

He told me, specifically, not to take more of the over-the-counter on the assumption that the beetroot would somehow balance it out — because that would be the kind of small change that should involve my doctor's office and not me on my own.

He told me to call him back, or to call my doctor, if anything changed.

I want to say something now that I am going to say several times before this letter is over, because it is the only thing in this letter that matters more than anything else.

If you are on any medication — prescription, over-the-counter, anything — call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add anything new to what you are already taking.

Especially if you take an over-the-counter pain reliever on any kind of regular basis, the way many women my age do.

Do not, under any circumstances, change a prescription or an over-the-counter routine on your own on the strength of what some retired librarian in Ohio wrote in a letter you found on the internet.

The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether what you are thinking about adding makes sense for you.

I called Stephen. I would call him again tomorrow if I were adding anything else. The two minutes it takes to ask are worth every second.

I was adding it to what I was already doing.

Not stopping the thyroid medication. Not changing how often I took the over-the-counter when I needed it. Not adjusting anything else.

I started on a Monday.

The first two weeks I felt nothing in particular, and I want to tell you that honestly because the temptation in a letter like this one is to compress the timeline and pretend something dramatic happened on day three.

Nothing dramatic happened on day three.

I had read enough alongside what Joan had told me to know that bodies are different — some people notice something within the first week or two, some people take much longer than that, some people don't notice much at all — and I was prepared to land in any of those camps.

What I noticed, I noticed slowly, in pieces I did not connect at the time.

The first thing I noticed was the morning warm-up.

I have, for about four years, had a half-hour at the start of every day during which my hands were not quite my hands yet.

After a few weeks, I noticed that I had opened the cabinet for the coffee filters one morning without thinking about whether my hands were going to cooperate, and I realized halfway through the motion that they had cooperated, and that there had been no negotiation.

I made the coffee, drank it, and went on with my day.

It was not until that afternoon that I thought back and realized what had happened.

The second thing I noticed was the knitting.

I have been knitting in twenty-minute sessions for about three years, because longer sessions had become more than my hands wanted to give me.

Sometime in the second month, I sat down with my knitting after dinner one evening and the next time I looked at the clock it had been forty-five minutes.

I had not noticed my hands during those forty-five minutes, which is its own kind of news at sixty-four.

I put the knitting down because I was tired, not because my hands were tired.

The third thing I noticed was the morning conversation Joan had described.

I want to use her words for this because I do not have better ones.

My hands had been the first conversation I had with my body every morning for four years.

Somewhere in the second or third month of taking the beetroot capsule, that conversation got quieter.

They are still my hands. They are still sixty-four. They still talk to me when I have been pulling weeds in the garden for an hour.

But the morning conversation has changed.

I want to be careful with what I am telling you, because I am writing this to people I do not know and I do not want to overstate anything.

I am not telling you Rosabella did any of that on its own.

I had been doing the pottery class for almost a year by the time I noticed anything, and the pottery class itself had been good for my hands — keeping them warm, keeping them moving, building small motor skills.

I had been walking more in the year leading up to this, because Doug and I had started taking the dog out twice a day after his second knee acted up.

I had been making a point of stretching for ten minutes in the mornings, on a tip from my daughter.

There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a person decides, finally, to pay attention to something that has been quietly bothering them for years.

All I am telling you is that I added one small thing to a long list of things I was already doing, kept everything else exactly the same, and a quiet stretch of months followed that had not been preceded by an equally quiet stretch.

That is the honest version. I would not trust anyone who gave you a cleaner one.

I saw my doctor at my next annual, about eight months in.

She did the same examination she does every year. She looked at my hands, asked her careful questions, and ran the bloodwork.

The bloodwork was where she wanted it, in the same ranges it had been the year before.

She told me to keep doing what I was doing.

I told her about the pottery and the walking and the stretching and the beetroot.

She nodded the way she nods when she is processing something. She did not push back on any of it.

She told me to come back in a year.

That is the whole story.

I am not, as I said, the kind of woman who writes letters to strangers.

But I have been thinking about Joan at the next wheel ever since that Tuesday in the fall, and about the small kindness of telling another woman, casually, without performance, what you have been doing.

If Joan had not said anything to me, I would still be opening the peach preserves two-handed in the morning and adjusting around my hands the way I had been doing for four years.

I do not know what Joan is doing now. I see her about every other week at the same pottery class — we have both signed up for the spring semester — and we talk about the grandchildren and the centering of the clay and the things women our age talk about at a pottery wheel.

I have told her, once, that I had taken her advice and that I was grateful.

She nodded the way she did and said, I am glad.

And we had gone back to our wheels.

If you are reading this and you are living with the kind of low-grade, quiet, daily aches I have been describing — and you have been told by your doctor that there is nothing to treat, and you have adjusted, and the body you live in is just achier than it used to be in small ways that have become part of your day — I want to say a few things to you carefully.

I do not know you. I do not know what your doctor has said. I do not know what you are taking.

Bodies are different. Some people notice something within the first week or two of adding something like this. Some people take much longer. Some people don't notice much at all.

That is the honest version, and anyone offering you a cleaner one is selling you harder than I am.

Here is how I think about Rosabella now, in the words I would actually use.

It is something the body uses.

The research community talks about it in the context of supporting healthy circulation, supporting cardiovascular wellness, and supporting the body's own natural inflammatory response — in people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in.

It is not a fix for anything.

It is one small thing you add to the long list of things you are already doing for yourself.

Please call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add it.

If you are on any medication at all — prescription or over-the-counter — and especially if you are on a regular over-the-counter pain reliever, this is non-negotiable.

The people who know your chart will tell you in two minutes whether what you are thinking about adding makes sense for you.

I am a retired children's librarian in Ohio who met a woman at a pottery wheel. I am not the person to ask. Your pharmacist or your doctor is.

The company has a ninety-day satisfaction guarantee. If you are not satisfied — for any reason at all, including just changing your mind — they refund you.

It is not tied to your bloodwork. It is not tied to anything you have to prove to anybody.

If you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied. That is the whole policy.

The beets are grown on a small operation that harvests on its own schedule, which means there are stretches when they are in stock and stretches when they are not.

I mention that not to push you — please do not let anybody push you into a health decision — but so that if you go to the site and they are out, you know why.

That is all I have. Thank you for reading this far.

I hope something here was useful to you. And I hope, somewhere in the country today, Joan is at her wheel making something beautiful with hands that have been carrying her for sixty-eight years.

— Pat

P.S. I want to come back to the cold-press for a second, because I rushed past it. The betalain pigment — the deep red, the part the research community keeps circling back to — is heat-sensitive. If you process beetroot the standard way, with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat. Rosabella chose the slow way. Cold-press, low temperatures, more of the compound through to the capsule. It costs them money and time. They made the choice anyway. That was a piece of why I picked them, and at sixty-four it is the small things that tell you who you are dealing with.

P.P.S. Two capsules. In the morning. With a glass of water. That is the entire protocol. No powder to mix, no afternoon dose to remember, no schedule taped to the inside of the cupboard door. I keep the bottle on the counter next to the coffee. Doug and I have earned a simple morning at this point.

P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time, because I have to. Please. Call your pharmacist or your doctor's office before you add anything new to what you are already taking. Especially if you are taking an over-the-counter pain reliever on a regular basis, the way many women my age do. They have your whole picture. I have written you a letter. There is a difference, and the difference matters. The two minutes it takes to ask are worth every second.

P.P.P.P.S. The guarantee, again, in case you skimmed. Ninety days. Any reason at all. You do not have to prove a single thing — not to them, not about your numbers, not about how you feel. If you tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied, and they send the money back. That is the whole policy and it is a small-company policy, the kind of thing companies used to do when companies still answered the phone.

P.P.P.P.P.S. The thing Joan said at the pottery wheel — my hands had stopped being the first conversation I had with my body every morning — has been with me for a year and a half now. It was a small sentence, said casually, by a woman I had only just met. I think about it almost every day. I think about how many small kindnesses get exchanged between women of a certain age, at a pottery wheel, at a grocery store, in line at the pharmacy, in waiting rooms, that we never tell anyone about. I do not know what the equivalent of Joan is in your life. But I hope you find her. I hope someone says a small sentence to you that gets you to start paying attention. And I hope, in a year, you find yourself doing something you used to do without thinking about it — opening a jar, knitting for forty-five minutes, getting through a Sunday's dishes — and you realize, halfway through, that you have not been thinking about it at all. I hope that is for you. That is the whole reason I wrote this letter.

— P.

Individual experiences vary. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
