Write About Someone's Hands

I have my mother’s hands. I am one of four girls, and the only one who has my mother’s hands. Except hers are a little flatter. And by that, I mean they are long and skinny like mine, with thick sturdy nails that when left can grow long and rounded, but when I grab them they feel thinner, flatter, like I could squeeze enough to feel my own hand coming through on the other side. My mother’s hands are organic. I cannot remember a time when I have seen them painted or manicured, maybe once for my sister’s wedding. I remember the wet-black ink stains that spotted her middle finger, ones that would last for weeks. She was a calligrapher and her hands were her tools. She’d grasp the quill tip pen so gently, its sharp pointed tip sticking up like a peacock feather, gracefully circling her wrist above the off-white easel-hung paper, guiding the spilling ink into form. I would sit next to her with my quill tip pen and soft grainy paper and attempt to make the letters as beautiful and dark as she did.

Her nails are in perfect proportion to her hands, kept short enough to not get in the way, but long enough to reach just over her fingers, revealing the whiteness that borders her hands like snow caps. She would use the tips of her fingers and into her nails to pluck the harp that sat in our living room. Like stroking the paper with the quill pen, she would stroke the multi-colored strings of the harp, gyrating her hand back and forth, soft tunes of Greensleeves escaping her grasp. Her voice was clear and gentle, and reminded me of the nights she would sit on my bottom bunk, her head crouching down to rub my lower back, singing just loud enough for me to hear. The harp still sits in our living room, and from time to time I will hear her through the other room, recalling the notes with her fingers and not stopping until she’s completed a song without error.

The skin of her hands is much looser now and I can see the dark veins coming through, reaching up and in towards her thin wrists. Her hands are freckled, unlike mine, just like the tops of her shoulders and front of her chest where her v-necks didn’t cover. The freckles turn darker when she squats out in the garden in summer pulling weeds from her herb garden, fluffing the mint and spreading the basil and thyme. She would hum when doing this, as if the leaves of mint were strings of her harp and the soil she’d pat, my soft little back.