HANDS

                                                            

When my wife and I were married almost a half of century ago, one of the photos in our wedding album was a picture of our crossed hands. I don’t remember it being taken and it must have seemed insignificant at the time. I was probably lost in the excitement of the day. For a few brief minutes the other day, looking for a different photo, I took out that album and I stared at that old black and white picture. Then I went and took her hand in mine and looked at the physical differences, all of these years have made to our hands. Those same hands, still wearing the same rings, we gave to each other on that day. Those hands that were so vibrant, unwrinkled, and unblemished back then, now showing the ravages of age and time. The bones are so much more apparent today, the skin parchment thin and peppered with age spots.

But then my meandering thoughts went in another direction and I thought of where those hands had been and how much they had accomplished over all of these years, and the stories they could tell if they could talk. I looked at her hands again and I saw them white with flour from the kitchen counter and black with dirt from the garden. Stained with berry juice at canning time and splotched with paint. I saw them dabbing tears from a little girls eyes and holding a wet cloth to a sick child’s forehead. I remember them turning the pages on a Doctor Seuss book while our son sat wide-eyed on her lap. I watched as they raced effortlessly back and forth on a typewriter keyboard and remembered the yards of cloth they had pushed through a sewing machine. I recalled how good they felt when they massaged the tension out of my shoulders after a hard days work, and the times they gently held my face while she softly kissed away all my troubles.

Then I looked at my own hands and remembered the day I cut my finger off at work, --the scar still visible. I remember the countless nails I pounded building our home and the nail I shot through my finger-- the one that no longer bends. The times I played catch with my kids in the backyard and showed my son how to throw a curve ball in little league. There were the times they were black with soot from my days on the fire department or sticky with someone’s blood. The days I stood by my parents grave and wiped my own tears away with the back of my hands. The times I baited hooks for my kids in the boat and all the times I offered them in friendship to so many people, and the times I just held them to my face and clasped them in prayer.

But the times I remember the most is when I took her hands in mine and we walked and talked, or just sat and tried to give each other a transfusion of caring and love, as if our empathy and emotions could just flow miraculously from fingertip to fingertip. Her hands fit so well in mine that first time I held them way back then, and today---well they fit even better. It’s as if our hands somehow became the coupler for us, the point of origin that joined us together over all of our years of partnership and remarkably today. Their simple touch can convey our innermost thoughts through some unexplainable process, which defies explanation and needs no words.