My husband's hands had been cold for two winters. Then they weren't.
My name is Kathleen.
People have called me Kathy since I was a girl.
I am sixty-three.
I live in a small house outside Portland, Maine, with my husband, Roger.
Roger is sixty-five.
He was a commercial fisherman for forty-one years, mostly on lobster boats out of small harbors along the southern Maine coast.
He retired three years ago.
He retired the year his back finally told him it was retired, which was about ten years after his back had started telling him it was retired.
We have two grown daughters. One is in Boston, one is in Burlington.
I retired four years ago, after twenty-nine years as the children's librarian at our town public library.
We were, on paper, where two careful people from a working coastal town in their sixties hope to be.
I want to tell you something about Roger that I want you to hold while you read this.
Roger has had rough hands for as long as I have known him.
He started on the boats when he was twenty-two.
Forty-one years of lobster traps, ropes, salt water, cold wind, wet gloves, and wet hands in winter.
His hands have never been the soft hands of a man who works inside.
They have always been the hands of a man who works outside, on the water, in the cold.
I knew that before I married him.
It came with the man.
I am telling you that because what follows is not a story about hands that were always warm and that suddenly were not.
It is a story about hands that have been a certain way for forty years and that, somewhere in the last two winters, became a quieter version of themselves.
About a man whose circulation was always something we both noticed a little, and that we had both started to notice a little more.
For the last two winters, my husband — sixty-five years old, on no prescription medications, with a doctor who tells him at every annual visit that his bloodwork is in the ranges he wants it in — has been quietly cold in a way he was not before.
I am going to tell you what I mean.
It looked like this.
It looked like the woodshed run.
We heat partly with wood. Roger has been bringing in the wood from the shed every morning in winter for twenty-six years.
The shed is forty paces from the kitchen door.
The job takes twelve minutes if you load the canvas carrier properly.
Roger had been a twelve-minute wood man for twenty-six years.
For the last two winters, he had been wearing gloves on a five-minute trip and coming back inside with his hands tucked under his armpits, asking me to make the tea hot.
He had not said anything about it.
I had been pretending not to notice him asking me to make the tea hot.
It looked like Roger's feet.
Roger had not worn socks to bed in our forty years together.
The previous January he had started wearing wool socks to bed.
Just on the cold nights.
Then on all nights from November through March.
I had not asked him about the socks.
I had bought him a second pair, quietly, and washed them with mine, and put them in his drawer.
It looked like the mailbox.
Our mailbox is at the end of our driveway, about two hundred yards from the house.
Roger had walked down to the mailbox every afternoon for thirty-one years.
He had been doing it more slowly for the last two years.
Hands in his pockets.
Shoulders a little higher.
I had been watching him from the kitchen window with my coffee and pretending not to watch him.
It looked like the armchair.
Roger had been sitting in his armchair under a wool blanket from the back of the couch for the better part of two winters.
The house was warm.
He was wearing a flannel shirt.
He was under a blanket anyway.
None of it was alarming.
He had been to Dr. Walsh — a careful man we have both been seeing for fourteen years — for his annual physical the previous spring.
Bloodwork in the ranges Dr. Walsh wanted them in.
No medications. No concerns. No flags.
Roger was, by every measure anyone could see on his chart, a sixty-five-year-old man in fine shape who had retired three years earlier after a long career outdoors.
But the man I had been married to for forty years had been cold in our own house for two winters.
I knew it.
He knew it.
We had not said it to each other.
I started going to our town farmers market on Saturday mornings about six years ago.
It is a small market.
Twelve booths.
Cheese, eggs, bread, vegetables in season, flowers from a small farm a few miles west of us, honey, jam, and a man who sells smoked fish.
I go for the cheese and the bread mostly.
I had been nodding for the better part of two years at the woman who runs the flower booth.
Her name is Janet.
I knew that from her booth sign.
She was a few years older than me, I would guess.
We had said hello at the start of every Saturday and goodbye at the end of every Saturday and we had not really talked.
That kind of friendship is its own thing.
You can have it with another woman for two years at a farmers market without ever knowing very much about her.
The Saturday in January was a Saturday like every other Saturday, except colder than most.
It was twelve degrees with a wind off the water.
I had come down for the cheese.
The cheese man was late.
His van had broken down on the highway. He would be there by ten-fifteen, his wife had texted around to the booths.
I had thirty minutes to wait.
I was standing under the small canvas awning Janet had set up over her booth, stamping my feet to keep warm.
There were not many flowers in January. She had some small bunches of dried lavender, a few jars of dried hydrangea, and three small pots of paperwhite narcissus that had bloomed early in her greenhouse.
She had seen me stamping my feet for ten minutes.
She turned to me and she said: Kathy, would you like some tea? I have a thermos. I will not have time to drink it before the morning is over.
I said yes.
She poured me a paper cup of hot black tea with a little honey in it.
I held it with both hands.
We talked.
We talked about the cold.
We talked about the cheese man being late.
We talked about her flowers and the greenhouse she and her husband had built three winters ago.
We talked about my daughters.
She told me about her husband.
She said his name was Carl.
She told me Carl was sixty-eight.
She told me he had done construction for forty years and had quit because his knees had quit before he did.
She told me they had started the flower farm together fifteen years ago, mostly because Carl needed something to do with his hands that was not as hard on his body as a hammer all day.
I listened.
I sipped the tea.
Then she said something I have been thinking about every day since.
She said: Kathy, I have been wanting to ask you for a few months. Is Roger all right? I have noticed he stopped coming down to the market with you about a year ago. I am not asking to pry. I am asking because I have been there.
I sat with that for a moment.
I looked at the cup in my hands.
I said: he is not unwell. His doctor is happy with him. His numbers are fine. But he has been cold for two winters. He has been slower for two winters. He has been quieter in his own chair under a blanket in a warm house for two winters. I do not know how to say it any plainer than that.
Janet was quiet for a long minute.
Then she said: I had been holding Carl's cold hands for three winters. I had been telling myself that was sixty-three. It turned out it was something quieter than that.
She told me about Carl.
She told me that for three winters after Carl turned sixty, he had quietly become a man whose hands she could not warm.
She told me she had stopped trying to warm them somewhere in there because the trying was harder on her than the cold was on him.
She told me she had been telling herself it was the weather.
She told me she had been telling herself it was sixty-three.
She told me she had been telling herself a great many things for three years.
Then she said: about five years ago, I added one small thing to Carl's mornings. I read for a month before I added it. I talked to his doctor and to his pharmacist before I added it. I want to be careful with you about what I say next, because Carl is one man and you are looking at one man and bodies are different.
But Carl has been more himself for the last five years than he was for the three years before that. He has been doing the small daily things he had quietly stopped doing. He has been a man whose hands I do not flinch from anymore.
She said it without performance.
She said it the way a woman says something at a farmers market in January in twelve-degree weather to another woman who is standing under her awning with a paper cup of tea.
She wasn't selling me anything.
She was just telling me.
I asked her what she had added.
She said it was a beetroot capsule.
She said the brand was called Rosabella.
She said she had picked it because the small company that made it cold-pressed the beetroot at low temperatures rather than processing it with heat, and because Carl's doctor had specifically said that how the supplement was processed mattered for what made it from the field into the capsule.
The cheese man pulled into the lot at ten-twelve.
I thanked Janet for the tea.
She put her hand on my arm before I left.
She said: please call Roger's pharmacist before you add anything. That is the only thing I am going to be insistent about. Promise me.
I promised her.
I bought my cheese.
I drove home thinking about Janet.
I drove the rest of that week thinking about Janet.
By the weekend, I was thinking about what I was going to do.
I am, by temperament, a careful person.
A children's librarian for twenty-nine years is, almost by definition, a careful person.
I do not add things to my body or to my husband's body without understanding what I am adding.
I went home and I started reading.
I read for almost three weeks.
I read about beetroot.
I read about the deep crimson pigment in the root.
It is called betalain.
It is the color that stains your cutting board for three days.
It is also, according to a long and patient body of research the cardiovascular community has been quietly building for decades, one of the more potent antioxidants in the food supply.
I read about the long, slowly built relationship the structure-function research has had with this vegetable.
In the context of supporting healthy circulation.
Supporting cardiovascular wellness.
Supporting the body's own cellular energy.
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 a vegetable that has been quietly studied for a long time by careful people who were not making outlandish claims.
The language being used in the careful, structure-function corner of the conversation was the language I had been quietly looking for.
Supports healthy circulation.
Not improves circulation.
Not fixes cold hands.
Not treats poor circulation.
Just supports.
In people whose numbers are already in the ranges their doctors want them in.
That was the shape of the language I had been hoping to find.
I read about the cold-press, too.
The chemistry is straightforward.
The betalain pigment is heat-sensitive.
If you process beetroot the standard way, with heat, you lose some of the compound to the heat.
Rosabella cold-presses at low temperatures because they want 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.
It costs them more.
At sixty-three, after almost three decades of paying attention to small operations in our town — small publishers, small bookstores, small libraries — I have come to pay close attention to the small decisions companies make when no one is watching.
Those decisions tell you everything.
The other thing I liked was the simplicity.
Two capsules in the morning with a glass of water.
I have a husband.
I have a small house in southern Maine.
I have a Saturday farmers market.
I am not interested in a protocol that requires its own shelf.
Now I need to tell you the most important part of this letter.
I made Janet a promise at the market.
I kept it.
Before I added anything to what Roger was already taking, I called his pharmacist.
His name is Chris.
He has been the pharmacist at the small independent pharmacy in our town for thirteen years.
I have been filling our prescriptions there for the entire thirteen years.
I called him for a specific reason.
Roger is on no prescription medications.
He takes a multivitamin and a vitamin D.
I called Chris anyway.
I called because I am a careful person and because I wanted somebody who knew what was on Roger's record to confirm that adding a beetroot capsule to a multivitamin was the right thing to do at his age.
Chris pulled up Roger's profile.
He confirmed there were no concerns at the dosage on the label.
He told me Roger could take it in the morning with his coffee the way the bottle suggested.
He told me to call him back if Dr. Walsh ever started Roger on any prescription medication in the future, because the conversation would be different at that point.
He told me, before he got off the phone, that he wished more of his patients made the call I had just made.
I also called Dr. Walsh's office that week.
I left a message with his nurse, with the same information.
She called me back the next day to tell me Dr. Walsh had no concerns about Roger adding it at the dosage on the label.
I want to say something now, plainly, to every reader of this letter.
If your husband — or your wife, or you yourself — is on any prescription medication, especially anything cardiovascular, please make the call before you add anything new.
I made two calls.
Roger was on nothing.
I would have made three if he had been on a cardiovascular medication.
So should you.
The two minutes the call takes is the most important two minutes of your engagement with any supplement.
I told Roger that night.
I told him about the market.
About Janet.
About the cold tea I had not had.
About Chris and Dr. Walsh's office.
I told him I wanted him to try it for me.
He looked at the bottle.
He looked at me.
We have been married forty years.
He knows when I am asking something that matters.
Chris said it was alright?
He said it was a sensible thing to add at my dose, which is no dose of anything else.
And Dr. Walsh?
The same.
He nodded once.
Alright. For you.
In the morning I set two capsules on a saucer next to his coffee.
He took them with his first sip.
I did not say anything more about it.
He started on a Monday.
The first two weeks he felt nothing in particular.
I had read enough alongside what Janet had told me to know that bodies are different.
Some people notice something within the first week or two.
Some take much longer.
Some don't notice much at all.
I was prepared to land in any of those camps.
I was prepared to be honest with myself about the result.
What I noticed, I noticed slowly.
The first thing I noticed, around week six, was the woodshed.
It was a Saturday morning in February.
It was nineteen degrees outside.
I was at the kitchen window with my coffee.
Roger came in from the woodshed with a full canvas carrier of cordwood.
He set it down on the hearth.
He pulled off his gloves.
He held his hands out toward the woodstove for a moment, the way he always had.
Then he turned around and walked back out to the shed for a second load.
He came back five minutes later with the second carrier.
He set it down.
He didn't hold his hands toward the stove that time.
He did not ask me to make the tea hot.
He went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of the tea I had already made and he drank it at the temperature it was at.
I did not say anything about it.
I did not want to make a thing of it.
I had read enough not to make a thing of one observation.
The second thing I noticed, around week nine, was the socks.
It was a Tuesday night in early March.
I was getting into bed.
I noticed Roger's feet under the covers as I climbed in.
His feet were bare.
The wool socks he had been wearing every night for over a year were folded on top of his dresser.
He had not been wearing them for almost a week.
I had not realized until that night.
I did not say anything about it.
I curled up on my side and I went to sleep with the man I had been married to for forty years sleeping next to me, both of us with bare feet, for the first time in two winters.
The third thing I noticed was the boat.
We have a small seventeen-foot skiff that Roger used to take out on summer weekends to fish for striped bass.
He had stopped taking it out two years ago.
He had told me he just did not feel up to dragging the trailer down to the launch and back.
The boat had been under a tarp in our driveway for two summers.
It was a Saturday morning in May, around month four.
I came downstairs at seven.
The tarp was off the boat.
Roger was at the side of the boat with the cover off the outboard motor, with a wrench in one hand and a rag in the other.
He had been a fisherman for forty-one years.
He knew an outboard the way most men know their own wristwatch.
He worked on that motor for two hours.
At nine he came inside and asked if I wanted to come down to the launch with him in the afternoon and watch him put it in the water for the first time in two summers.
I went with him.
He took the boat out by himself for forty-five minutes while I sat in the truck and read.
He came back in with a small bluefish.
He filleted it on the dock the way he had always filleted small fish, in about two minutes, with steady hands.
I want to be careful with what I am telling you.
I am not telling you Rosabella did any of those things on its own.
Roger had been walking down to the mailbox a little more deliberately in the weeks after the market.
He had started, on his own, after that Saturday in January, to come with me to the cheese booth most weekends.
He had been moving more deliberately for several weeks before the woodshed and the socks and the boat.
Something had unlocked in him the night I told him about Janet that had nothing to do with a capsule on a saucer.
There were several things changing at once, the way there are when a wife finally tells her husband what she had been pretending not to see for two winters.
All I am telling you is that he added one small thing to a long list of small things he was newly doing.
He kept everything else exactly the same.
And a stretch of months followed that was qualitatively different from the two winters that had preceded it.
That is the honest version.
I would not give you a cleaner one.
Roger went into Dr. Walsh's office for his annual physical about seven months after he started.
Bloodwork the week before.
Dr. Walsh studied the results.
He looked at Roger.
He said: whatever you are doing, your numbers are in better shape than they have been since you retired. Keep doing it.
Roger told him about the boat.
About the mailbox.
About the beetroot.
Dr. Walsh nodded.
He said: that is a sensible thing to add at your age. There is good research on antioxidant support. Keep doing what you are doing, and come back at the usual time.
Roger called me from the parking lot.
He didn't say anything at first.
Then he said: Kathy. I think I might be alright.
I was standing in our kitchen.
I sat down at the table.
I cried the way a woman cries when something she thought was leaving comes back to her instead.
I see Janet most Saturdays at the market.
She has a small ritual now.
We meet at her booth around eight-thirty.
She pours me tea from her thermos if she has it.
I tell her small things about Roger and she tells me small things about Carl and the morning moves the way Saturday mornings move.
I owe her one for the rest of my life.
She does not act like I do.
I am telling you all of this because I think you might be where I was last January.
Watching someone you love quietly become cold in his own house.
Watching the small things he used to do quietly stop being things he does.
Watching his doctor look at his chart, and smile at his numbers, and tell you everything is fine.
If you have been telling yourself it is the winter, or the sixties, or just aging, maybe it is worth asking whether there is one small additive thing that might support what his body is already trying to do.
Not as a replacement for anything his doctor has him on.
Just as a question.
A thing to add.
A conversation to have at his next appointment.
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 cellular energy.
In people whose numbers are already in the range their doctors want them in.
It is not a fix for anything.
It is not a substitute for a medication.
It is not a treatment for cold hands.
It is not a treatment for cold feet.
It is not a treatment for poor circulation, or for any specific circulatory condition.
It is one small thing you add to the long list of things he is already doing for himself, alongside everything else.
Please call his pharmacist or his doctor's office before you add it.
If he is on any blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, or anything cardiovascular at all, this is non-negotiable.
I called Chris.
I called Dr. Walsh's office.
I would not have added anything to a prescription without those calls.
Neither should you.
The people who know his chart will tell you in two minutes whether the supplement is safe to add given what he is already taking.
I am a sixty-three-year-old retired children's librarian in southern Maine.
I am not the person to ask.
His pharmacist or his 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 anything you have to prove.
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.
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.
I hope, somewhere today, your own Janet is standing under a small canvas awning at a market in your town, waiting for you to come stamp your feet in front of her booth.
— Kathy
P.S. I want to come back to the cold-press for a second.
The betalain pigment — the deep crimson, the part the research community keeps circling back to — is heat-sensitive.
That is the chemistry of the molecule.
Process beetroot the standard way, with heat, and 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. It costs them time.
They made the choice anyway.
At sixty-three, after a lifetime of paying attention to how careful people do careful work, I have come to believe that the small decisions companies make when no one is watching tell you everything.
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.
Roger keeps the bottle on the counter next to the coffee maker.
He takes the capsules with his first sip.
He makes the coffee now.
That has been the rhythm of our morning for almost a year.
We have earned a simple morning.
P.P.P.S. I am going to say it one more time, because I have to.
Please.
Call his pharmacist or his doctor's office before you add anything new to what he is already taking.
Especially if he is on a blood pressure medication, a cholesterol medication, or anything cardiovascular.
They have his whole picture in front of them.
I have written you a letter.
There is a difference, and the difference matters.
The two minutes it takes to ask are the most important two minutes of your engagement with any supplement.
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 his numbers, not about how he feels.
If he tried it and you are not satisfied, you are not satisfied.
They send the money back.
That is the whole policy.
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 sentence Janet said to me under her canvas awning at the market — I had been holding Carl's cold hands for three winters; I had been telling myself that was sixty-three; it turned out it was something quieter than that — has been with me every day for almost a year.
I had been doing that exact thing about Roger for two winters.
I had not realized, until Janet said it, what I had been doing.
I had been holding his hands.
I had been telling myself it was the winter.
I had been telling myself it was the sixties.
I had been telling myself it was the lobster boats.
I had been telling myself a lot of things, the way wives do, to keep from saying out loud the small quiet thing that is happening to a man who has gotten quieter.
If you are a woman standing in your kitchen on a winter morning, watching the man you love come in from a five-minute trip to the woodshed with his hands tucked under his arms, you are not imagining the dimming.
You are not being dramatic.
You are reading the man.
I hope you find your own Janet under her own canvas awning at your own market.
I hope you accept the tea she offers you.
I hope you read carefully.
I hope you make the call before you add anything.
I hope, in a year from now, you are standing at your kitchen window on a Saturday morning, watching the man you love come back from the shed twice without holding his hands toward the stove.
I hope that for you.
That is the whole reason I wrote this.
— K.W
DISCLAIMER
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.
