Hands

Hands have always amazed me, from the cracked calloused fingers of my co-workers to the fresh soft skin of my daughter’s tiny fingers. They are the things I hold out to ask for help, they are the things I use to give help. My hands have planted thousands of trees, they have cut down hundreds more. They felt the grain and shaped the wood that became my daughters crib, and they have held my wife during the best and worst times. They have amazed me over and over again at how easily they can create beautiful objects such as baskets, pens, socks, meals, and these words you are now reading. Yes they are their own entity, although my mind guides them they create the objects, they put the craftsmanship in them. I have been blessed with these hands. If you hold your hands together like pages of a book what stories do they tell: a small tattoo given to me by a pencil on my right palm reminds me of doing homework in my dad’s office when I was a kid. A line that runs through my left index finger interrupting the fingerprint like a stick being drug through an oil sheen on a puddle reminds me of a wonderful fourth of July, when I really found fly fishing and learned that corn can be broken and does not need to be sliced. A mark on my palm reminds me of running laps in the Cispus gym and a nail that wiggled itself loose on the wall. Right now my hands are telling a different story, they are swollen and discolored ,they have no less than a dozen cuts and feel like they are on fire, this is not a new feeling for them (although it has been a while) this is a story of work, a resume of a manual laborer. I currently am working in a factory with many other immigrants; polish and other eastern Europeans, Portuguese, Turkish, Indonesian, and many others. These are hard working people, their list of skills not having anything to do with Microsoft but with older more basic skills of strong backs and scarred hands. These people wake up stiff and sore having to bend those fingers over and over again in the morning just to get them warmed up and for the swelling to go down so they can go back and do the job that created that condition in the first place. I may be privileged with my education my skin color nationality sex but I have worked enough jobs and held my own to understand and respect the grunt workers. Palm trees painted on your nails makes me chuckle, rings and bangles make me curious, but when I see a pair of knarled scarred and swollen hands it makes me smile. Those are hands that tell a story, those are hands that create beautiful things, those are hands that make the world go around.