Grandmother's Hands

 

“Why does she have a grandmother’s hands?” a friend’s young daughter asked of me many years ago, hurtful in the unwitting way that young children can be. 

 

Sun damage I could have said; my having grown up in the high desert of New Mexico, holding the reins of palomino horses on rocky June trails, catching minnows in mountain streams.  My not painting my nails, maybe she meant—because they chip (except in Italy when I drank frothy steamed milk several times a day in earthy calcium-rich cappuccino) and break while planting blue lobelia, chopping garlic and onions for guacamole, playing Chopin nocturnes rather badly, stumbling on the notes.  Once playing jacks, gathering agates, figuring algebra on a chalkboard.  Washing dishes at dusk, feeling the grace of smooth-lipped bowls held in both hands, making them clean.  My never being able to get enough lotion to soak in, scented with lavender or almond, cherry blossom from the south of France or my favorite Bert’s Bees milk and honey, or discontinued sandalwood. 

 

But I love this hand I photographed in a garden in Saratoga, weathered and full of life.  I should be grateful to have hands as worn as this, a pilgrim’s hands, prayerful hands, practical hands, unpampered hands which gather marjoram and sage and put out water for the birds, which write on paper and computer keys always wherever in the world I am and that way talk to friends and gather stories and history and lives through thoughts and scoop up joy and gratitude with insatiable greed. 

 

“What do you do with this hand?” a massage therapist asked me one December, surprised that it was so tired and tight.  I was surprised in turn, thinking “well, live.”  What don’t I do with it?  "I am a writer," I told her.  It seemed so obvious. My hand is what I am. 

 

So in the end I couldn’t ask anything better than to have the hands of a grandmother, of my own grandmother and grandfather too, the hands which made Orange Pekoe tea and worked the leather of saddles, the hands that held me, showed me love.  The hands of strangers which stroke saffron on a forehead, which carve santos, which stitch up wounds, which offer shadowplay in firelight, read Braille, string pearls, polish a skate blade, plug a dike.  The hands in which a tarnished coin might lie, reading heads/tails, telling my own or someone else’s fortune, while the lines of my palm show the way. 

 

(reposted from Writing with Light, April 2015)

 

 

 

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, Hand, Villa Montalvo