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I like my hands. I like what they do. The
Hands are made to be used. My hands are pretty heavily used, although for the final hour or two of each day all they do is hold a book and turn pages.
My hands like to dig in the garden. I once had a neighbor who was a gardener and a nurse, and she impressed upon me the importance of wearing gloves when working in soil: there are a lot of dangerously scary microorganisms that can enter through a cut on your finger. She said, "Always wear gloves!" I've never forgotten that. So each time I go to the garden I put on my gloves. I dig a little something, I pull a few weeds, and I whip those gloves off faster than the eye can see.
I HATE wearing gardening gloves. You can't feel anything. You can't feel the roots or the little delicate stems as you are transplanting. You can't distinguish the warmth of the soil at the top from the coolness of the soil four inches down. So I take my chances with the microorganisms. But I do scrub my hands with a brush after I garden.
If you learn to play a musical instrument when you are young, your hands will never completely forget how to play it. My fingers still remember basic flute fingerings, even though I haven't played the flute for fifty years. And on the piano, though I rarely play now, my fingers know the notes, can still automatically feel the intervals, and even shift themselves, if they have to, into the proper fingering for scales. Astonishing!
My hands have woven baskets from reed and willow. Baskets are handmade. Think of that the next time you see a cheap basket. Who made it? How long did it take to make it? What was the craftsperson's monetary reward?
My hands knit and crochet, those two single-thread techniques for making fabric. I love the feel of good wool slipping through my fingers. I can't explain to anyone how the left hand holds the yarn. I can show them. But if I try to tell them, I can't say whether you start with the back or the front of your left-hand pinky. But my hands know without thinking and are always happy to twine the yarn through the fingers to create the right tension.
These hands have held babies. I haven't ridden a bicycle in fifty years, and I don't think I remember how, despite the old saying. But babies? You never forget how to hold a baby. I see a baby and my hands and arms ache to hold it. I'd hold it cradle-wise first, and then in burp-position, over the shoulder (always the left shoulder, for me). One hand holds the little bottom in position, the other, fingers spread, reaches from baby bottom up to the shoulders, feeling the bones of that tiny spine. No, your hands never forget how to hold a baby.
When I was a teenager, I had dreams of being a hands and feet model, simply because both my hands and my feet were long and narrow, said to be a sign of elegance. It is a measure of my naivete then that I never realized 1) how very much more beautiful than mine one's hands had to be if one wanted to make a living from them, and 2) the amount of upkeep that would be required, should I actually try to be a model for hands and feet. I've since read about it: if you model hands, you must never USE your hands. You never do dishes or dig in the garden, for example. You certainly never do your own household repairs. Or chop your own vegetables. You don't wield a knife for any reason. You don't play guitar or violin or cello because playing a stringed instrument will callous your fingers. Each night you must cream your hands with expensive ointments and then encase them in soft cotton gloves. And manicures! You spend all your earnings on manicures!
Well, you get the idea. Not for me the life of a model. Can't be bothered. Too busy doing. The human tornado, whirling from one hand-job to the next (so to speak). These hands are busy busy busy. Making bread. Making biscuits. Making pinwheels for grandchildren. Making bouncing babies for Hannah's birthday. Mending rips and tears in fabric or skin. Sending energy to people who want it. Knitting. Sorting. Typing (and what a blessing now not to have to correct six carbons, as I once did). Making ice cream. Ironing clothes. Playing Mozart on the piano and Bach on the cello (not terribly well yet, but still . . .). Tickling children—only a little, never to the point of distraction. Holding hands. Playing peek-a-boo. Playing patty-cake and This Little Piggy. Waving to subway conductors. Gathering stones from the river and shells from the sea. Brushing the wounded knees of children and stroking the bodies of lovers. Squishing fingers into sheepskin. Sliding silk over the arched back of the hand.
Feel. That's what hands do. They feel and discern, they distinguish, they tell us what's what.
All of this is much more fun than being a model of hands. And it's a good thing I've found fun for my hands, because they've definitely lost their looks! The thumb that I jammed and then ignored forty years ago is now "Ann's arthritic thumb," ugly and swollen, though not painful. That was the first insult but hardly the last.
Now I have nodes of arthritis that are lumpy and bumpy, veins that are oversized and squiggly—to the point that I became a person-of-interest to the doctors at the hand clinic, until they finally realized that it isn't pathology but simply my mother's hands.
When I remember, I put cream on my hands, cheap cream that my husband brings home from hotel visits. Too cheap for my beautiful, working hands, but I keep forgetting to look for the good stuff, and I'm not sure I would spring for it even if I did remember and did find it. It's too late for the pricey stuff.
So I file my nails and I push back my cuticles when I think of it. My hands are utilitarian and hard-working. I love them.
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