Guest column: Hands ...

Hands. From the time I was a young girl I’ve noticed them. First, with my mother as she deftly kneaded and twisted dough into bread or caramel rolls. She covered a plywood slab, which my Papa Al had cut for her, with flour sack towels, pinning the overlapping edges to the back with thumbtacks. Flour was sprinkled and baked goodies — the stuff of childhood dreams and aromas — magically formed under her practiced hands as I watched nearby, perched upon the high stool.

Push and pull. Push and pull, in the centuries-old kneading rhythm of countless mothers before. Mama also washed our clothes in a wringer washer, the smell of steaming hot water, bleach and Fels-Naptha filling the air. More than once she almost caught her fingers — red and wrinkled from the water — in those churning, pincher rollers of death as she fed our clothes through, carefully folding the edges under to protect the buttons. Then they were neatly pinned on the clothesline, to capture all the scents of outdoorsy goodness as they dried. Matching dresses and new spring coats were pieced together under the silver presser foot of a Pfaff sewing machine, the needle darting in and out as her hands guided the pastel fabric in perfectly straight seams.

Baby sweaters, afghans and countless acts of yarn also took shape under her nimble hands as knitting needles clacked and crochet hooks twisted in and out, dragging skeins in their wake.

I also noticed the hands of my mother’s mother — “Granny,” as we five siblings and one lone cousin called her growing up in rural North Dakota. Her hands were from another generation. One that routinely lit kerosene lamps and held horse reins. One that learned in single-room schoolhouses and canned produce to survive. One without modern medicine, that caused hands to desperately clasp in prayer for Papa Al as he recovered from tuberculosis in a sanitarium miles away. I scrutinized her much-older hands as she sat next to us in the church pew, holding a hymnal or folding a hankie into a “baby in the cradle” to keep squirmy children quiet the entire hour. Her skin was thinner and her blue veins easier to trace. But they wiped away tears and taught us to weed and garden. They grew gladioli and snapdragons and held onto our little hands, always squeezing three times: our code for “I.Love.You.”

Later, it was my piano teacher I observed as she sat next to me on the bench, demonstrating harmonic scales and augmented sevenths. Her hands had short nails, sunspots, and that same blue roadmap of raised veins. Hands that had lived far beyond my elementary school-aged ones, but whose grace and ability to stretch full octaves fascinated me nonetheless.

I had never much liked my hands. As a child, I bit my nails so my fingers were always in various stages of healing. Cuticles frayed, hangnails “hanging,” and nails but “nubbins,” as Granny used to say. There was even the occasional soak in Epsom salts and hot water to rid an infection when it had gone too far. A lost nail or two when it was really bad. My dad had gone so far to say he’d quit smoking if I would quit biting. Besides the bad habit, my fingers were also short with big knuckles. Not at all like the slender, elongated, and perfectly manicured ones of the hand models in the catalog the Avon lady brought each month with her sample lipsticks.

Today I allow myself the guilty pleasure of visiting the nail salon every couple of weeks, justifying the cost with the fact I don’t smoke or drink … and it’s preventive, right? Avoiding the infections of childhood and all. At 60-plus years, my fingers aren’t any less stubby, my knuckles any less large. If anything, they’ve grown more wrinkled, thinner-skinned and blue-veined than ever. Somehow, overnight it seems, they’ve morphed into my mother’s hands. My grandma’s hands. My piano teacher’s hands.

As I bemoaned my “ugly” hands recently, one of my own girls, a mother now herself, picked them up, stroked them softly, and gently countered, “But I love these hands … they’re my Mommy’s hands … the hands of love.”

Huh. There it was. The message of mother, grandmother, piano teacher. Hands that had so diligently worked baking, sewing, washing, caring. Hands that had beautified the lives of those around them with homemade quilts, vases of flowers, and fresh garden carrots. Hands that had produced classical music and hymns that enriched the soul. Hands that had served, indeed had lived a lifetime of service. Hands of comfort. Of reassurance. The hands of love in my life.

So in spite of myself, I looked down at my own stubby, big knuckled ones and saw them beautiful.

Cloquet’s Denise Hammond is married to her high school sweetheart and they have nine grown children and 18 grandchildren.