A very important discussion for us aging farts.

I have Raynaud's Syndrome, a circulatory problem that drastically reduces blood flow to the fingertips of my right hand whenever it is even slightly chilled. The immediate effect is numbness, and over a few weeks -- say, from Thanksgiving to Remembrance Day -- it causes painful fissures in the skin. Consequently, I have become a flat-picker.

When my husband and I moved across Ontario nearly four years ago, I lost my session connections and almost stopped playing both guitar and mandolin. Last summer, when the pandemic restrictions were eased for a while, I started playing tunes on mandolin with a fiddler I met a couple of years ago at the Goderich Celtic College, a diddly music boot camp. At that point, I had not played at all for a year.

Oy, the pain, but the calluses came back within a week. I also found that the arthritis in my left hand is still mild enough that I regained almost as much mobility as I had at 50, although two fingers are usually locked in trigger position when I get up in the morning.

Most days now, I do about fifteen minutes of guitar scales and half an hour of jigs & reels on the mandolin as part of my fitness routine; the other thing that really helps is washing dishes in scalding hot water (wearing gloves, of course).

But I find it difficult to sing by myself.