Someone wrecked my mother's market stall. She opened again the next morning.

Not stole. Wrecked. The table went over, and most of what was on it went with it.

I got there before she did. I remember standing in front of it doing the arithmetic without meaning to, because that is what I do, counting how many jars were gone and what that came to. She arrived a few minutes later and did not do any arithmetic at all. She crouched down and started picking up the ones that had survived, one at a time, and wiping them on her sleeve.

I asked her what she wanted to do. She said, we open tomorrow.

My mother makes a balm out of beef tallow and raw honey. Her grandmother made it. It is five ingredients and it is not sophisticated. For most of my adult life it was, to me, one of the slightly embarrassing things my mother did, along with keeping the good plates for a visit that never came.

Then I got a job where my hands were in water all day, and by January they were cracking at the knuckles, and I had a drawer of expensive tubes that each worked for about an hour. I used hers because it was there and because I had run out of ideas.

Four nights later my hands stopped hurting.

I am aware of how that sounds. I did not believe it either. I assumed it was the weather. Then I stopped using it for a week to see, and my hands went back, and I stopped assuming.

She is not a chemist and neither am I, but it took me a while to appreciate that this is more than most of the tubes in my drawer could manage.

Lotion is mostly water. To keep water and oil together in one bottle you need emulsifiers, and emulsifiers move fat around, including the fat your skin barrier is made of. So the water evaporates, takes some of your own moisture with it, and the product quietly works against the thing it was sold to fix. An hour of relief, then back to tight.

Tallow has no water in it, so nothing evaporates, and its main fatty acids are the same ones your own skin oil is built from. The honey is the part I did not understand at first. Honey holds water. Tallow seals. One brings the moisture, the other stops it leaving.

That is the whole recipe, and my mother has been explaining it patiently to people at a folding table for a year.

Fewer jars. Same table.

I have thought about why that bothered me so much and I think it is this: she started this at forty-nine, after a working life of jobs that were somebody else's idea, and the whole thing has always been one bad month away from not existing. Somebody knocked it over in about four seconds.

She has never once said any of that out loud. She just wipes them on her sleeve and opens again.

So this is me, not her, asking. If you have dry skin that cracks in winter, or a drawer of tubes that each work for an hour, hers is worth trying.

Ninety days. If it does nothing for you she refunds you and you keep the jar.