Resume of life

This brick path is being constructed by me with gloved hands. I don't like to wear gloves, but the bricks and the shoveling and the sifting the rocks from the soil I remove are so hard on my bare hands. I have always thought my hands were, as hands go, a nice compliment to my otherwise plain, short and now stubby body. Not being a very vain person, I have always liked the way my hands looked. As a child these pastie white hands burned in the rays of the hot summer sun, as I did chores assigned, and played outside when the work was finished. They hoed weeds in the yard, pulled weeds in our garden, froze in the early winter morning hours as milk was fed to calves, and frozen water dishes were broken for other animals. By the age of 4, I was learning to hold a crochet hook and weave yarn carefully around my nimble fingers under the careful eyes of my maternal grandmother. My 6th grade teacher taught the class to knit on those winter days too cold to be allowed outside at recess. My mother taught me to embroider and my fingers pushed the needle up and down, fingers getting pricked in the process. Then I was taught to sew and we made most of our own clothes. These hands worked one summer in a beet field with my mother, on my hands and knees, thinning sugar beets. Later for six plus months, they supported my body on a pair of crutches as my broken leg and foot were healing. After high school I became a keypunch operator (when a computer occupied an entire room), and later a typist and then worked as a secretary...all requiring my fingers to fly across the machines as many as 8 hours a day. As a mother of two, they did all of the "motherly" things mother's hands do. I learned to decorate cakes and that is one of the most stressful actions on the wrists, hands and fingers. I am a stained glass artist and using the cutters and other related tools are brutal on hands. I tried throwing pots..never quite getting the hang of it, but I do love mosaics and grouting. I build birdhouses and have learned to use lots of tools, but again the staple guns were tough on the hands. (now there are electric ones) Now I am finally getting to do some quilting also. I have always done gardening and for the life of me cannot wear gloves!! ( gotta get them in the soil) My hands help me talk. If someone tied them behind my back I would not be able to talk. (A joke my dad always told me.) Looking at my hands now, they are so abused and weather beaten and just plain ugly. Of course they are getting older and the skin is getting thinner and the veins are getting bluer and more pronounced. Today I heard an artist discuss a water color she had done of an old woman and her weathered hands. She said something that inspired me. She said that she felt that "hands are a resume of a person's life".

I will forever remember that quote. Seeing my fingers with their tale tell signs of arthritic joints and my scarred palms and veins popping, and my aching wrists, I must have a hell of a resume of my life!