my hands

I just read a post from a friend who also has a blog about her family, and she wrote about her hands. She wrote about how, at her age, she's starting to see her mother's, and her aunts', hands in her own hands. And she loves that legacy.

It's funny that she wrote about it, because I've been seeing my hands recently too. Maybe there's something about the age of thirty, that the girlishness finally wears off of our hands.

My hands were always very soft and pretty. I loved the look of my hands. I got compliments on them too. In particular, one guy friend of mine said once that they were perfect. And I agreed with him, without pride. I just knew they were pretty, and I enjoyed that.

My hands don't look like that anymore. It started in my mid-twenties, working at coffeehouses. There's so much work with one's hands in that environment. They lost a little of their plumpness. And now, as my 31st birthday approaches, they bear little resemblance to those pretty girlish hands of my adolescence. The skin has thinned and they show their veins. They have had too much sun, especially my left hand, from constantly having my hand out of the car window in that California sun in my youth. My knuckles seem bigger, and sometimes the joints ache.

Funnily enough, I don't really mind. Yes, I enjoyed having pretty hands. But now I appreciate what those hands can do. Those hands can soothe two screaming babies at the same time. Those hands make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for my boys. Those hands planted seeds in a garden for the first time this year, and those same hands pulled out the full grown plants for dinner. These hands took me through graduate school and the hundreds of thousands of words that were typed in it. These hands are workhorses.

I was a lazy child, folks. Goodness, I was so lazy. These hands remind me that I gladly gave up the laziness and selfishness of youth for family and hard work.