Can you believe it? Two posts in as many days. Not that I haven’t been thinking about things to write. In fact, while I’m cleaning or cooking I’ll often have a post idea running through my mind but when I sit in front of the blank “New Post” page I get slightly overwhelmed and neurotic and, well, chicken out. However, today I am plowing on, and I even took a picture specifically for the blog.
Yes, that is my hand. And I love it. I have many reasons – they make my piano sound like an instrument and not a noisemaker, they create food, clothes, quilts and sweaters, they have a nice big vein that makes it ever so easy to give blood, and the knuckles don’t crack (I’ve always shuddered when someone cracks their knuckles). They can do all those things and more. Amazing, aren’t they? And yet, the real reason I love my hands is much simpler and more important than anything they can do or produce. The one thing that makes me love my hands so much is that they remind me of my mom’s hands. As a little girl I would look at her hands and compare them to mine, wondering at all the signs of wear. Never let my hands look like that, I would say to myself. They look so old and used next to my new, smooth, unworn hands. And now, I look at my own hands with their own signs of work, and I know how they got that way. I know that all those creases came to be through acts of love and dedication, that the calluses are a mother’s proof of devotion. My mother was a hard worker. In the kitchen, the garden, the house, all day long, for love of my father, my brothers, my self. Not only did she teach me how to be a woman, but she taught me how to love others through the works of my hands. I’m forever grateful. And that’s why I love my hands – because I love her hands. They are the picture of beauty to me.
