A crumb
But first, a preface to the crumb.
I haven't been here lately. My son is out of
school until after Labor Day and we've had a
series of pet-related good things and bad
things. Cat dying: bad. Adopting a kitten and
a new adult cat: good. Nora the dog passing a
pea-sized bladder stone at the Emergency Vet:
bad, though it could have been much worse.
Attempting to dissolve remaining stones
through antibiotics and diet: good, though if
it doesn't work she will still need surgery.
Me giving Nora cranberry extract pills with
xylitol in them: potentially very bad,
since xylitol can be
fatal in small doses to
dogs. Nora surviving xylitol
exposure unscathed: amazingly, wonderfully
good.
In between pet-things and kid-things, I'm
still taking the Round Robin, a writing
prompt-based class. So here is a crumb for
those of you who are still reading this blog,
from the prompt I
remember.
I
remember that her fingers were thickened by
arthritis, were scattered with freckles.
Helen’s nails were coffee-stain yellow,
bitten down to the quick, and she kept
fumbling at the wedding ring on the fine
silver chain around her neck.
I looked at her hands because it was easier
than looking into her eyes, or letting my
gaze drift to her useless foot in its bright
blue stocking. Sometimes after a visit I’d
look at my own hands and realize that time is
written on our hands the fastest of all.
Already my knuckles are puckering in
idiosyncratic ways and the backs are
beginning to resemble the uneven surface of a
barren planet, ropy with rocky veins and
hairline fracture wrinkles.
Helen wasn’t a worker. The hardest work her
hands had seen was the kneading of whole
grain bread dough, maybe a bit of digging in
the garden. She’d cracked open books, propped
them up, her thumb and pinky keeping them
open. Me, though, I’d scrapped carcasses in
the field, held up splintery boards with the
meat of one palm while I grasped a hammer in
the other. Some jobs we worked all winter
long, if we were lucky inside, but we weren’t
always lucky.
I read a book once about men working on a
tower, applying mortar and making repairs in
the ice and slush of January. They were
suspended from ropes attached to scaffolding,
wore gloves with the fingers cut out as a
symbolic act. Their hands were gouged and
scuffed, palms smoothed by rough passes over
granite, life and work written on the
body.
Image: The kid, pretending
to be a cat, because we don't have any good
pictures of our actual cats being actual
cats. Yes, he is holding an egg mold, which
is this fictional cat's weapon of choice. It
makes him fly or it's a bomb or he shoots it
or something.
Home is where the guest blogger post is or how La Belette Rouge coaxed me out of my blogging cave
She has also tempted me back to blogging by asking me to write a guest post for her August series on the concept of home. It's a rich topic and I gave it a very writing to survive twist.
My post, Home in objects, is here.