It’s an odd thing in humans that we all have parts of the body that we love more than other parts. I love hands. I’ve always been captivated by them. Maybe it is because I love stories and other than a person’s face, hands tell visible stories. They tell stories in their doing and then in what their doing does to them. Other than someone’s face, it is the feature that I really look at when I meet someone. Hands come in so many variations of size and conditions. Some with missing fingers. Some with long fingers and some with short fingers. Some bent with medical conditions and some crooked from injuries. Some strong and some weak. Steady. Shaky. Rough. Smooth. Brand new and old.
There are a couple of pictures that exist in my mental storage and in my physical picture files. One is one of the many famous picture of Georgia O’Keefe’s hands taken by Alfred Stieglitz. It is the one where it is just her hands against a black background. The left one is reaching up and the right one is clawing down. The hands reaching to achieve their own art and clawing against convention to do so. The next one is an old set of records in a large album cover. I bought them at a book sale in a mall when I was 17. It is Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor. The cover is a picture of just his hands which is why I bought it. Those incredible hands that created some of the most powerful piano pieces filled with endless waves of emotions. Those hands that needed a new piano piece for Rachmaninoff’s American debut, so they wrote the Piano Concerto No 3 in D Minor. They then, due to time constraints, had to learn to play it on a dummy keyboard they drew out on the floor of the boat coming to America.
The last picture is more recent. It is a picture of my mother’s hands that I took when I went to visit her. My mom has arthritis so in the picture my mom’s hands are a bit like a topographical map. Full of mountains from the swollen joints with delicate valleys below barely covered by transparent skin. Her veins look like rivers flowing from the mountains to the valleys and all the parts in between. Her nails are short at the end of the plains of her cuticle meadows changing colors of various pink hues. To me, they are beautiful..
I know that they didn’t always look like this but try as I might, I can’t remember what they looked like. It seems odd because my memories are flooded with the hands of my mother. I know her hands did all the normal things like feed me, clothe me, change me and all the things needed to take care of a child. But, this is not why I remember them.
I remember hands holding books. Books at the library. Books at home. Books in the car. Books in our life. And mostly books being read to me. It was a particularly hot summer one year when I was a child. We didn’t have air conditioning like most homes then. It was a pool and fans that got us through the days and nights. My three sisters and I played ourselves out each day in the pool and coolness of the garage or basement. Bedtime would come before night time fully arrived. To dispel our protests of “not fair” and “ I am not tired “ or “ it’s not even dark” , mom would read to us. I remember this summer her reading through the Anne of Green Gables series. She had recently rediscovered it herself and couldn’t wait to share with her girls. I would lie there watching her hands holding the book and turning the pages. My eyes growing heavy with her voice and steady hands turning pages. Her hands would somehow know to stop turning pages at just the right time to keep us wanting more but too sleepy to protest.
I did grow up going to church quite frequently. Even then it was hard for me to sit for too long without my hands doing something. Summers were the hardest as the church would get so hot that you were sure you melted to the hard wood pew. I would slump against my mom begging for some distraction. She would pull out a pen and piece of paper and quietly draw a dog. She knew that I couldn’t resist a dog of any kind. She drew the same dog each time but I loved it; however, it wasn’t the dog so much that I loved but her drawing of it. I loved watching her hands guide the dog out of the pen. I was fascinated that a blank piece of paper could now have this dog on it that her hands made. I have never lost that fascination. It is one of the things that still send thrills through me. To see a blank piece of paper change all because of your hand using some instrument to create on it.
Piano was also a big part of our childhood. We all took lessons so it seemed as if there was always someone playing the piano at our house. I took lessons all the way from 5 years old until college. My mom’s hands spent what must have seemed like endless hours driving us to and from piano lessons. When I was the last girl left at home, these drives were special times that my mom and I got to spend together. Her hands were always there to turn pages for us, play a duet , clap at our recitals and shush us when she wanted to hear something one of us was playing. They also played the piano the few times it would be free. Usually at night before bedtime when we would beg her to play By a Blue Lagoon by Maxwell Eckstein. She would sit down at the piano and with no music to guide her, her hands would take off and never stopped until they reached the end of the song. I loved listening to her play it and watching her hands fly across the keys.
I was a freshman in college when I was in a terrible car accident that changed my body and life forever. I had to leave college and skip a year trying to figure out what exactly had happened to me. I would spend the rest of my life in a recovery of sorts but that is for another story. I had just returned to college when one night my appendix started to rupture and I had to have emergency surgery. I was trying to recover in a dorm room which is not the most friendly for post surgery recovery. My mom was worried and drove to see me. She took one look at me and her hands flew into action packing my things to take me home. A week later I woke up in terrible pain and a terrible incision infection. I ended up in the ER where they had to open the incision and clean it and let it heal from the inside out. My mom’s hands were awarded the task of cleaning and packing it three times a day. The first time she had to do it, I was lying on the floor of her apartment living room. She knelt beside me with all the wound care equipment and said “ I don’t know if I can do this” and I said “ I don’t know if I can get through it “ . We both cried and held hands and then laughed at our crying selves. She said “ Okay. It has to be done so we are just going to do it “ She got to work and we both told each other to breathe. We got through it and the next two weeks. She would do it in the morning before she left for her job as a school teacher and then would come home on break and then do it again at night. It healed with barely even a scar.
Over the years , those hands nursed so many illnesses and injuries and scrapes and broken hearts. None more than the years spent helping my sister while she died of brain cancer. The sister that was my best friend growing up. The sister that was there in a way know one else could have been. Mom’s hands spent 8 years taking care of her and her three girls along with us. They did everything often doing it on their own accord as it was too overwhelming for her mind to sustain. It finally came for the time to say good bye to my sister. She had fought so long and so hard. The care facility she was in called to let us know we needed to be there. The greatest fear of my life was happening but first I needed to be there for my sister. I can still feel my mom’s hand holding my sister’s hand with me as we told her we loved her and it was okay to go. And the feel of my moms hands on me as I collapsed in utter sorrow and fear of being without my sister.
Things were not all sorrow and injuries although I think those are the times of such need that they are remembered so much more. My mom’s hands continued to always keep busy being there for her grandchildren and great grandchildren. My mom’s hands are a constant reminder to keep going and keep busy. They wrote a book. They started a career in story telling. They welcomed all in including the ever growing family. And many hours of game playing. Watching her hands turn over cards in Play Nine or laying down tiles in Scrabble. Waiting for them to finish shaking the tiles in Boggle and lift the lid so you could start finding words. Throwing dice down on the table hoping for a Yahtzee and many other games. Through it all I think of my mom’s hands as always holding one of ours. I love when she is around my husband as he holds her hand and it is a perfect blend of two hands that have held mine through many of life’s mountains and valleys.
As she has gotten older it has often been my turn to nurse her through many different health issues. It is my hands that have held her’s in a hospital bed after many surgeries. My hands that have crushed her pills when she could barely swallow . My hands that have cleaned her wounds, brought her food, driven her to doctor’s appointments and even held books to read to her. All with the same love that her hands have given me again and again. My mom and I as adults have very different views and opinions on some things. I have taken a different path in my beliefs which at times has put us at odds. We don’t always see eye to eye but our hands seem to always still find a way to be holding hand to hand. My mind is flooded as I write this with so many more memories than I can tell. It is the hands that guide us through our life. They do the physical writing of our stories and for that I will always love hands especially my mom’s.
