2007: Wrinkly Hands
I looked at the wrinkly skin on my hands just now and thought how they didn’t look like my Dad’s hands that helped shovel out the school bus when he went to school, one Iowa winter’s day in the early 1900s. Kids were expected to help shovel the bus out of snow drifts.
The wrinkly skin that is on my hands neither looks like my Mother’s hands who met up with a wolf on her way to her school, District 44 West in Palmville, and lived to tell the tale. I’d like to think her hands gripped her lunch pail bail and swept the wind aside as she ran north for home, as the wolf ran south for its life too, her scream still ringing in its ears.
No, the wrinkles on my hands are my own, I reckon. They've cut my infant daughter’s umbilical cord the early morning she was born, clapped together when she was chosen queen of her senior prom, and wiped my tears away when she graduated from Bemidji High School.
They held the telephone receiver when she called to tell me she had made it into Iowa State University’s School of Design, Fall Semester, her sophomore year of 2006, and again at the end of the semester when she made the Dean’s List.
On January 20th, this year of 2007, she’ll turn 20, another milepost in both our lives and another wrinkle on my hands.
October 2019: Both wrinkly hands were simultaneously clasped to my forehead in total disbelief when she announced she was pregnant. NO WAY! PREGNANT? ARE YOU JOKING?
June 2020. A baby girl!
May those hands bless many another happiness, large or small.
ReplyDeleteThe details about your parents' hands suggests the big love you have for your daughter, as well. Wrinkly hands - a great literary device and a great legacy.
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