An essay from her blog Brown. Girl. Farming.

Her hands are cracked, reeling from the whipping wind. Split, torn and dotted with splinters, numb to the impact of the wooden shovel. Cuts fade and reappear, garnishing her knuckles. Her palms tell the story of the day’s work, etching out the lines with black soil to the edge of her fingers, retracing every inch of land ploughed, every seed planted.
Her forearms are brushed with dried mud, some splattered onto her face. The rest is caked in every crevice of her fingernails and painted onto her faded, tattered clothes. It’s too early to see the callouses on her palms, but if you were to hold her hand, you’d feel them.
That is if you wanted to get close enough to hold my hand…because I probably smell, and not like Secret. This isn’t a poetic passage about the hands of a farmer. This is a real live description of how I, and many other women out there, look on a daily basis. Dirty, torn up and tattered. Probably not the three adjectives recommended for an OkCupid profile. And definitely not the conventional, feminine image of a woman.
Read the rest here.