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.