I was looking at them this morning.
The way you look at something you have had for a long time without looking at it, which is a different kind of looking, the looking that happens when the familiar becomes briefly visible again, when you see the thing rather than looking through it. My hands. The specific geography of them, the knuckles that are her knuckles now, the particular lines that are the lines of a hand that has been used, that has done the work that hands do over decades of a life that required things of them.
These hands wrote things.
Thousands of pages. Lecture notes and committee reports and emails at midnight and the thesis that took years and the poems that are taking years in a different way, a better way, the way that is chosen rather than required. They wrote letters to students who were struggling, the specific kind of letter that takes longer than it should because the words matter and the student’s name at the top matters and you want them to know you actually saw them rather than a file folder with their name on it. They wrote things that mattered and things that mattered only at the time and things that will not be read by anyone and all of it was the hands.
These hands held children.
First at the beginning when the holding was the whole of what was needed, the weight of a new person who was entirely dependent on the adequacy of the arms, and then throughout, the holding in different forms, the hand on the shoulder and the hand that reached for the hand in the dark of a bad dream, the hand extended at the graduation, the hand that let go in the parking lot of a university residence in August.
These hands have made a great many meals.
Have made the soup and the bread and the birthday cakes that were never quite level and the dinners that fed people who needed feeding and the tea that was the right response to nearly everything, the kettle on as the first move in a hundred difficult conversations, the mug placed in front of someone who was having a hard time as the beginning of the being-with-them-in-it.
These are good hands. They are her hands and they are mine.
They are still here in the morning light and they still have things to do and I am glad of them. I am, this morning, looking at them directly, glad of every line.
