In Honor of Mothers Day “HANDS”
Most of all, I miss her hands. When I last saw them in this life, they were crossed, idle, on a pale blue coverlet in the hospice house where she finally, after a year-long battle with cancer, needed them no longer.
I remember her fingernails, long for the first time ever, painted with lavender polish she never would have chosen herself, but the hospice nurse had primped her thin hair a bit, dusted her with powder, and polished her nails for her homegoing. Then she called us in to say our goodbyes.
She handed me mom’s wedding ring. It slipped easily from her shrunken finger. Its impression still remained. Mom had never, in sixty-six years, taken that ring off. It matched the one dad wore. His was on a chain around her neck, along with a cross and a tiny gold angel. The nurse gave the necklace to my brother. Through tears, we accepted these treasures. Oh, the finality of it all.
It was midnight when we got the call we’d dreaded. Although she’d been comatose that last week, we’d like to think she knew of our presence. We had just left her side a few hours before. She was eighty-years-and-nine-months old, the exact age I am as I write this piece.
I knew this last moment I spent with her, twenty-four years ago, she was with Jesus. The pain was gone. The IVs and tubes and man’s best efforts to save her ravaged body from cancer’s curse had tried.
Heaven’s pull was stronger. When Jesus called her Home, she was ready to answer with an unvoiced “Hallelujah.”
But I remember her hands. She had blessed so many with them.
She began this life in a dusty little town in Texas. A child of divorce and neglect, she was raised by her sainted grandmother, a wiry little fireball of energy who taught what she called “The Perfection.” Everything was to be done with vigor, with excellence, and with love as motivation.
Mom learned to beat the dust out of rugs, preparing the house for the arrival of Jesus at Christmastime. She learned to bake on Tuesdays, to garden on Wednesdays, to clean the house until it sparkled, every little corner of it, on Saturdays, and to wear gloves and fold those hands for hours of church and church gatherings on Sundays.
Somewhere along the way, she learned to darn socks, to sew her own simple shift-dresses made from bleached flour sacks. She founded the home economics club in high school and designed and sewed its banner flag. She hand-stitchde lace on our wedding dresses. I remember mom’s third finger with a silver thimble attached.
Mom’s hands were strong. She kneaded bread dough, used a hammer better than dad did, had callouses, which first, I’m sure were blisters, from digging the vegetable garden we so depended on for good food to eat. And she could pare potatoes, apples, and yams with precision and speed.
She decorated tiered wedding cakes, fashioned flower bouquets for friends, and made literally hundreds of popcorn balls for Sunday school kids. She packed boxes of clothes and picture books for missionary boxes sent around the world, and refinished furniture, built picture frames, fashioned doll dresses, and cuddled grandbabies.
I think her fingers were asbestos. She hated tomato skins, so boiled tomatoes and peaches a few minutes, then slid the slimy skins off the still-steaming fruit. And she peeled eggs before they cooled. She always spit on her fingers then touched the iron to see if it sissled and was hot enough to chase wrinkles away. She taught us to pull taffy when it was still hot and sticky.
Come to think of it, she also about froze her fingers hanging clothes on the pully line attached to the back porch on cold winter days. Later, she’d reel in the sheets, stiff as boards, drape them over the sofa by the fireplace to finish drying, filling the house with fragrance Febreze™ could never match. Then she’d call all four of us kids to play the Sock Game, matching our socks in rolls, making our chores fun.
She bought herself an old Royal typewriter, the kind that looked like it was in a suitcase. She studied the book that came with it and taught herself to type. Left hand, A,S,D,F,G and scoot over to H. The right hand, home space was J. She practiced every day for weeks because she wanted to take a home-study course in interior decorating. Then she earned her real estate license. Then she sold Childcraft books and demonstrated food preparation in the grocery story. She opened a dress store in our home and did alterations for free. Whatever her hands found to do, she did well.
Sometimes, her hands got her into trouble. If a wall in the house was in the wrong place, she’d wield a mighty hammer blow and use a crowbar to simply dismiss it. Dad would come home from work at lunchtime and find the living room and dining room were now one. He’d warn her that the second floor could land up falling. Her response, “Well, you can fix that, right? I just wanted it to be one big room!” So, there would be a gaping hole that dad would frame up with a beam of sorts. With her success on this first one, she combined three other rooms just that way. Last I knew, the house still stood intact.
She painted and wallpapered each one, and in a final hurrah, in the sixties, bought a truckload of knotty pine planks and paneled the entire living room. Took her weeks of hammering and sawing. She wanted the real thing so she could smell the wood. No sheets of paneling for this decorator!
She created a laundry room from the back porch when we finally got a new washer and dryer. She made a room where there wasn’t one. The floor always sagged a bit, but the plumber thought the water pipes would be fine and the electrician got power to the spot. A trap door in the center of the room led to the basement. Her temporary arrangement became permanent. This was way before building codes and inspections.
Her hands canned and froze foods, created home-made ice cream to sell, and created meals for seven of us day in and day out on a very limited budget. Her hands soothed fevered brows, shot rats with a twenty-two rifle, mixed cement to line an old stone flower bed, building us a wading pool, and built a stone wall in front of the house so we had parking places for our cars and dress shop customers.
She and dad learned to play bridge and entertained often. We also had game nights. She taught us to play jacks. She was really good at it. And she gave amazing parties. On the occasion of Eisenhower’s election, noisy guests welcomed the election results on one of the earliest TVs. We kids watched through the upstairs railings to figure out what all the hubbub was about.
She threw a huge party on Christmas Eve after church. Her large collection of angels, lovingly unpacked for the occasion, decorated every nook and cranny with careful attention to scale and impact. Cotton was used for snow. Creeping pine vines from the woods twined down the stair railings and around doorways. She had a magical touch that made our humble home just sparkle for the holidays. Our ornaments were mostly handmade, and she taught us to string popcorn and cranberries and soothed us when we pricked our fingers.
Her hands guided miles of fabrics through her sewing machine’s channels. Upholstery, curtains, three daughters’ matching dresses and creative Halloween outfits for years, her wardrobe, pillows, bedspreads, teddy bears and doll clothes. In later years she designed and sewed huge kites that flew the Florida skies with magnificent colors and designs. Nothing was too big a job to tackle, even our wedding gowns and veils. Her hands created style and attracted admiration.
When her hands held a paintbrush or palette knife, she was an artist. She took art lessons, loved doing landscapes, and painted a mural on the foyer wall of the Hudson River lighthouse and Rip Van Winkle Bridge.
And she taught herself to weld, making sculptures. Notably, she molded structural remains of our dad’s burned-out business, pieces of steel, auto parts, twisted shelf brackets, and pieces of the metal ceiling tiles into a sculpture she named “Our of the Ruins, Phoenix Rises.” It still adorns the sidewalk of the rebuilt business in Hudson, New York.
I remember her patiently teaching me to stretch a sock over a lightbulb to darn holes in the heels. She kissed my pinpricked fingers, praised my fumbling efforts, and persisted with me until I mastered not only that skill, but intricate embroidery and crewel.
She always held hands with dad, and whatever she was doing, stopped that activity the minute he walked through the door at the end of the day. She took his face between her hands, flour dusted or not, and kissed him tenderly, following that greeting with a big hug and loving smile. He was her everything, and when he died suddenly a week after his sixty-first birthday, she wrung her hands in anguish, as if she didn’t know what to do with them. He was gone.
Ultimately, she found her passion in writing. She wrote articles, stories, books, letters, and devotional guides. She volunteered to teach illiterate teenage pregnant girls. When she couldn’t find appropriate materials, she created them. She taught thirteen-year-old Ethel to read and helped her learn to care for her baby.
Like me, she discovered joy of writing late in life, and together, this year, in honor of her, I published her memoir, complete with several of her writing pieces. My sisters and I discovered much about this amazing woman we never knew before I began this project. She wrote a book about angels; she completed a manuscript for an evangelical novel called “Thief in the Night” which inspired my two books, “It’s a God Thing!” and “It’s Surely a God Thing!”
I’d like to think her hands are raised in praise in heaven and are touching us children and her grandchildren with palms down benediction. She was a blessing to those who knew her, and I honor her. Mostly, I miss her hands.
About the Author
