Your hands are soft, hardworking and determined. When I look at my hands, I see yours - when you look at your own, you see your mother's. Three generations of hands holding generations of memories. When did my hands begin to look like yours? One day I looked down and there they were: long, slender fingers, ivory skin speckled with darkening age spots, prominent tendons and blue vein paths traversing palms, fingers and dorsal planes.
The softness of your hands is one of their most memorable features, and yet it is a mystery to me. By my estimation, at a rate of three meals a day for 43 years, your hands have prepared a total of 47,085 meals). This estimate is low of course, as it doesn't account for all of the baked goods prepared for events, dishes made for large family gatherings, or all of the snacks that sustained your two active little ones.
Homemaking hands are hardworking hands: they feed family and community alike. They tend to the cleaning and maintaining of home and community spaces. Your hands do nothing halfway: cooking from scratch; washing pots, pans, and dishes by hand; and scrubbing, dusting and cleaning. By all calculations they should be toughened with time, yet their softness defies not only their actions, but also believability.
Your hands also cultivate beauty. They dig in the hard dry ground and nurture tender green beauty. They plant pansies each autumn in sweet memory of your mother, they feed and water the birds on even the coldest winter days, sow seeds each spring, and faithfully water every thirsty plant all summer long.
Your hands are instruments of determined curiosity as they experiment with new crochet patterns and techniques. When you lie in bed at night waiting for sleep to come, your hands are still at work in your mind as you sort out challenges in your needlework.
My love for your hands isn't borne out of this birdseye view of all that your hands have done in service to your family and community. My love is borne out of the very personal ways that your hands have held and cared for me - these are the memories I hold dear.
Your hands held me and rocked me. They held the many books that you read to me. They kneaded bread dough, crimped the edges of piecrust, and shaped balls of cookie dough to fill our home with the most wonderful aromas of freshly baked treats.
Your hands prepared peanut butter and graham cracker finger sandwiches served on the tray of the little blue plastic tea-set with cold milk that we poured ourselves from the little plastic tea-pot. They delivered this most favorite snack for us to enjoy at our own little picnic table in the backyard. Your hands planted the flowers in our yard that allowed me to grow up with a knowledge of flowering plants.
Your hands often worked late into the night to sew outfits for me, smock dresses, or to resolutely meet a deadline so that I could have an outfit for my book report the next day.
When I sustained what could have been a very scarring injury to my face, your hands fastidiously tended my wounds and scars (despite my protests as an impatient six-year-old) and ensured that no evidence would remain that any trauma ever occurred.
When I was anxious and scared, they rubbed my back. Even still, I love when you come up behind me and rub my shoulders with your hands. Though they're aging and losing some strength, you still offer this loving touch.
Your hands have long been one of my favorite features, and it's because of how they've cared for me all of my life. When my hands began looking like yours I didn't see age - instead I felt wonder. It is a gift to me that in looking down at my own hands, I should be reminded of the hands that have cared for me best all of my life.
It is a wonder to me that you should look at your hands and see the hands of your own mother who raised and nurtured you. Generations of love and sacrifice, most often unmentioned and unnoticed, held in these hands with our long, slender fingers, rippling tendons, and increasing age spots. What mystery is this that hands can hold so much?