My Mother’s Hands EleanorKedney

I never thought of them as slight, though her fingers were long and thin. They were working hands—peeling five pounds of potatoes for potato pancakes, starching a shirt, handing my tired father a glass of milk, or hanging sheets on the pulley line fastened out our second-floor window to an oak tree across the yard. Her knuckles grew knobs with age, and the thickened cord in her right palm tethered her ring and pinky finger inward to permanent unrest. I only held her hand as a child, and then again when she was dying. Those were the two times I was afraid to let go.

Over the years, it was my nimble index fingers and thumbs that cleaned her hearing aids, sorted medications into day-of-the-week pillboxes, and tied the laces on her sneakers. Once, lying in the sunroom together on a twin bed, she reached her arm across my body, and feeling its weight, I pulled away. Touch was a chasm between us, and that moment she cried pries into my memory today, bookended by her lying in a hospital bed and not getting well. I climbed in, circled both arms around her back, held her chest to mine. Her hands smoothed my long brown hair she loved to unknot and curl into kielbasa ringlets when I was a girl. It was eight days before I washed it. I was no longer a daughter.