March 12 "Ten Hands"
Describe five different pairs of hands. (Some things to consider might be color; teture; shape; symmetry; condition; scars; tattoos; jewlery; etc.) For each pair of hands assign a name and a profession.
Nanny’s Working Hands.
Her hands were rough, with yellowed nails from years of smoking Pall Malls. There were calluses on the fingers from holding rakes and hoes and there were burn marks, scratches and scars from everything she had ever laid her hands on – frying pans filled with spurting oil, barbed wire fencing to be unwound from a horse’s frail leg, scrapes against the rocks from digging the graves of her three dead babies. Now these hands, holding each other together for eternity, lay still…locked against her chest as she lies in the coffin.
Bob’s Fighting Hands.
His hands are stout-fingered and brown with sun. They are the strong hands of a laborer, a brick layer, a fisherman, a man who can do anything. Hard talking, hard living, hard working this man has used these hands to batter noses and break cheekbones in pre-dawn barfights, when only a slight blue bruise the next day would give it away. One hard, brown hand curls softly around the elbow of his wife of 50 years as she shuffles down the hall…the other drags the IV pole. No one speaks.
Marion’s Teaching Hands.
These marvelous hands trail through the air as she talks, weaving invisible links between her words so that I can grasp them like a blanket and wrap them around my life. Her long arms and bony wrists stretch into many-fingered bouquets of hands working like birdsong to carry a message to my untrained ear. My eyes follow the movements and something shifts in my brain. I can see her index finger tracing the arc of my dream.
His Comforting Hands.
Oh, his hands, strong and big and masculine, are the hands that have comforted for 25 years. The weight and depth and breadth of his hands fits perfectly over the hole her childhood left in her heart. These hands with their square palms and sturdy, elegant fingers stem the flow of blood and hold her still until she can regroup, replenish and revive. He has no idea the way her heart leaps at the sight of these hands, even now with the nodules and bumps of rheumatoid arthritis, the crippling of knuckle and the freezing of the pinky she can still run her fingers lightly over these hands and feel the love and the care and the protection they have given her.
A Daughter’s Art.
Her hands are the softest human hands I have ever felt. The flesh is always warm and moist, like ripe fruit and her fingers are graceful in their construction and brilliant in their dexterity. Usually covered in graphite, paint, ink and charcoal these hands are still small and almost childlike. The right hand curls into itself with the thumb extended ready to calm the quiet child within. Seeing her suck her thumb, even now, causes my heart to lurch with a love that knows no bounds.
