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I found a journal in a shoebox in my mother's attic three weeks after she died. It was March of last year. We were cleaning out her house in Roanoke to get it ready for sale, and my brother Wade had pulled down the attic ladder and asked me to come up because there was "stuff up here that's gonna make you cry, Linda." He wasn't wrong. There were boxes of Christmas ornaments from before I was born. A wedding dress in a yellowed garment bag. My father's high school football jersey from 1962. And in the corner, behind a stack of National Geographics nobody had opened in 40 years, a shoebox. It said "Mama's stuff" on the lid in my mother's handwriting. I sat down on the dusty plywood and opened it right there. Inside was a little blue spiral notebook. The kind you'd buy at a drugstore for 89 cents. On the front in black marker she'd written "Daily." And every page, going back to January of 1998, had the same format. Date. Weather. A number from 1 to 10. And one sentence. I'm 57 years old. My name is Linda. I live in a little ranch house in Salem, Virginia, about 8 miles from where I grew up. My husband Calvin and I have been married 31 years. He's a foreman at a metal fabrication shop and a good man and he tells me to sit down when I look tired, which is most days now. My mother's name was Eleanor. Everybody called her Ellie. She died of pneumonia in February at 81 years old, but the truth is she'd been dying for a long time. Just slow. The kind of dying that looks like getting older to everybody who isn't paying attention. I sat in that attic and started reading her journal. January 4, 1998. Cold and clear. 4. Knees stiff getting out of bed but loosened up by noon. January 5, 1998. Rain. 6. Couldn't open the pickle jar for Joe. He laughed but I cried in the kitchen after. January 6, 1998. Snow. 5. Walked to the mailbox. Hands ached the whole way back. I flipped forward. Months. Then years. May 12, 2003. Sunny. 7. Skipped Bible study. Couldn't sit in the wooden pew that long anymore. October 8, 2007. Overcast. 8. Joe carried the groceries in. He didn't say anything but I saw him watching me. March 2, 2011. Rain. 9. The first time I've written a 9. Hips. Hands. Neck. Everything. I want you to understand something. My mother never once told me she was in pain. Not once. Not in 25 years of phone calls. Not on Christmas mornings. Not when I'd visit her on Sundays after church and she'd insist on making the coffee herself even though I could see her wincing when she lifted the carafe. I'd ask her how she was feeling and she'd say "Oh honey, I'm just getting older. That's all it is." And I believed her. Because that's what we'd been told our whole lives, wasn't it? That this is just what happens. You turn 50. You turn 60. And one day the stairs start to hurt and you stop reaching for things on the high shelf and you sit down a little slower and you stand up a little slower and you tell yourself it's normal. It's just aging. My mother was tracking her pain every single day for 25 years and I never knew. I sat in that attic crying so hard Wade came up the ladder thinking I'd hurt myself. I showed him the journal. He sat down next to me and read a few pages and then he just put his hand over his face and said "Jesus, Linda. She never said a word to me either." I took that journal home that night. I read every single page over the next week. 25 years of one woman's life measured in a number from 1 to 10 and a single sentence. I read it cover to cover in my kitchen, drinking coffee Calvin made for me because he could see I wasn't going to move. And about halfway through, around 2009, I started to notice something. I was rubbing my own hands. The way she described hers. The morning stiffness. The grip going. The way the cold made everything feel like sandpaper grinding in her knuckles. I was doing it too. I'd been doing it for years. I just hadn't been writing it down. Let me tell you what my last few years had looked like. I work part time at a fabric store on Main Street, mostly cutting yardage for quilters. I love it. It's the kind of job where retired ladies come in and tell you about their grandkids and their patterns and you spend the whole shift smiling. But the scissors had started hurting my hands about 3 years ago. Not bad at first. Just a stiffness. Like my fingers didn't want to close around the handles the way they used to. I'd flex them out between customers and tell myself it was the cold air in the store. Then it got worse. By the end of a shift my hands would be on fire. I'd drive home with the steering wheel feeling too thick. I'd come in and Calvin would already have dinner started because he knew I couldn't grip a knife to chop an onion anymore on Tuesdays. My knees had gone too. Stairs at church. Getting in and out of the car. Standing up from the couch after Wheel of Fortune. Calvin watched it all and never said anything. He's not a man who says things. He just moved the heavy stuff out of the high cabinets one weekend without telling me. He started bringing the laundry basket up from the basement. He bought me one of those electric jar openers and put it on the counter like it had always been there. I knew what I was doing. I was doing exactly what my mother had done. I was hiding. I was telling everyone "I'm just getting older" and I was rubbing my hands when nobody was looking and I was sitting down a little slower and standing up a little slower and one day my granddaughter Brynn was going to find a little blue notebook in my attic with a number from 1 to 10 on every page and she was going to cry the same way I had. That thought sat in my chest like a stone for a month. In April I called my sister in law Patrice. She's a retired nurse, lives over in Lynchburg, and she's the kind of woman who doesn't sugarcoat anything. I told her about the journal. I told her about my hands. I told her I didn't know what to do and that I was scared. She was quiet for a long time on the phone. Then she said "Linda, you know what your mama was tracking, right? She was tracking the inflammation. That's what that was. 25 years of her body running hot and nobody telling her there was anything she could do about it." I asked her what she meant. She told me about something she'd been taking for the last 14 months. Something a friend of hers from her old hospital had told her about. A berry called Amla. She said "Sis, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you it's magic. But I will tell you my hands don't hurt the way they used to. And I'll tell you I noticed inside of about 6 weeks. And I'll tell you I haven't stopped taking it since." I asked her what it was. And she sent me down a rabbit hole that took up most of the next two weeks. So here's what I learned, sitting at my kitchen table with my reading glasses on and a yellow legal pad and Calvin bringing me coffee every couple hours. Amla is an Indian gooseberry. People in India have been eating it for thousands of years. It's not new. It's not exotic. It's just a berry that doesn't grow well in North America so most of us have never heard of it. But the reason it matters, the reason Patrice's hands stopped hurting, the reason there are now stacks of research papers on this little green fruit, is because of what it does inside your body. It works on inflammation. Not the kind you can see, like a swollen ankle or a bee sting. The kind that's running quietly underneath everything. The kind your body has been doing for 20 or 30 years without you ever knowing. The kind my mother was writing about in her journal without knowing what to call it. Here's the part that made me sit up in my kitchen chair. When you're younger, your body has these natural systems that keep that quiet inflammation in check. They're like the cleanup crew. They sweep through your joints, your tissues, your blood vessels, and they keep things calm. But somewhere in your 40s and 50s, that cleanup crew starts slowing down. Not your fault. It's just what happens. The signals get noisier. The inflammation gets a little louder. And the places in your body that are doing the most work, your hands if you use them all day, your knees if you've been walking on them for 50 years, your hips if you've carried babies and groceries and laundry baskets for half your life, those are the places that start feeling it first. Amla supports those natural cleanup systems. It's loaded with these compounds called polyphenols that research has linked to a more balanced inflammatory response in the body. It's one of the most concentrated natural sources of vitamin C on the planet, which your tissues need to rebuild themselves. And the studies that have been done on it have looked at how it influences joint comfort, mobility, and the kind of everyday stiffness that nobody told us we could do anything about. Reading all this, I kept thinking about my mother. How nobody ever told her any of this. How she sat in that wooden pew at Bible study writing down a 7 in her notebook and going home and not saying a word. How she walked to the mailbox with hands that felt like glass and just believed there was nothing to be done. I ordered a bottle of Alevia Amla that night. I didn't tell Calvin. I don't know why. I think I was a little embarrassed. Like I'd been pretending I was fine for so long that admitting I'd ordered something to help me felt like admitting I'd been lying. The bottle came in 4 days. I started taking it the morning it arrived. Just like Patrice told me to. With water, with breakfast, nothing fancy. For the first 2 weeks, nothing. I won't lie to you. I was disappointed. I kept checking my hands every morning, the way you'd check a wound to see if it was healing, and they felt the same. But Patrice had told me to give it at least 6 weeks before deciding anything. So I kept going. Week 3. I was cutting yardage for a woman who was making a quilt for her granddaughter's college dorm. 4 yards of pink calico. And I got to the end of the cut and realized my hand wasn't on fire. I just stood there at the cutting table for a second. Then I helped the next customer. Week 4, I went up the basement stairs with a laundry basket without thinking about it. I was halfway through folding before I realized I hadn't held the railing. Week 5, Calvin and I went to a wedding in Charlottesville. I wore heels for the first time in two years. I didn't tell anybody. But on the drive home I cried a little because I'd been so sure I was done with shoes like that. Week 6, I made beef stew. I chopped a whole onion and three carrots and two stalks of celery without putting the knife down once. Calvin watched me from the doorway. He didn't say anything. He never does. But he came over and kissed the top of my head and went back to the garage. I'm not going to sit here and tell you Amla is a miracle. I don't think any berry is. But I will tell you that my hands feel different now than they did 4 months ago. I'll tell you that I can grip the scissors at the fabric store for a full 8 hour shift and drive home with the steering wheel feeling like a steering wheel and not a log. I'll tell you that I went to my granddaughter Brynn's softball game two weekends ago and I sat on the metal bleachers for 7 innings and got up at the end without anybody having to help me. And I'll tell you that I keep my own journal now. It's a yellow legal pad on my kitchen counter. I write the date and the weather and a number from 1 to 10. Most days it's a 2 or a 3. I wrote a 1 last Sunday for the first time in I don't even know how long. I sat at the counter looking at that 1 for a long time and I thought about my mother. About the 9 she wrote in March of 2011 when her hips and her hands and her neck all hurt at the same time and she didn't tell a single soul. I wish I could go back and tell her. I wish I could climb that attic ladder and find her sitting up there with her shoebox and tell her honey, this isn't just aging, this is something your body is doing and there's something you can do about it. But I can't. What I can do is tell you. Because if you're reading this and you've been writing your own number down in your head every morning, the way I was, the way my mother was, the way Patrice was for 30 years before her friend told her about this little green berry, I want you to know. You don't have to keep hiding it. You don't have to keep pretending. Alevia Amla is what I take. It's a clean formula, made in the United States, third party tested, and the company stands behind it with a 90 day money back guarantee. Which means if you try it and your number from 1 to 10 doesn't budge, you send the bottle back and they refund you. No questions asked. No phone tree. No fuss. That's why I felt okay telling Patrice yes when she suggested it. And that's why I feel okay telling you now. If you want to try it, you can find it at the link below. P.S. I still have my mother's journal. It sits on the bookshelf in the den next to my high school yearbook and Calvin's father's pocket watch. Sometimes I take it down and read a few pages. Not to feel sad anymore. Just to remember why I started. She lived 81 years and she deserved to feel a 2 instead of a 7. She didn't get that. But I get to. And maybe you do too. P.P.S. The 90 day guarantee is the part I want to make sure you heard. Patrice said it took her 6 weeks. It took me about 3. But everybody's different, and 90 days is long enough to actually know. You don't have to be sure today. You just have to be willing to find out. P.P.P.S. If you do order, please don't do what I did and hide the bottle from your husband. Tell the people who love you. Calvin had been watching me suffer for 3 years and he was so quiet about it because he didn't know what to say. The day I finally told him what I was taking and why, he reached across the table and held my hand the way he used to when we were dating. That was worth the bottle by itself. 👉 https://alevia.com/amla/33