In My Hands

 "The final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands."- Anne Frank

Hands tell a story.  My family comes from farming roots.  My great grandmother had worn her fingerprints away by the time she she was an adult and could not be fingerprinted for entry into the country.  My grandmother's hands were  marked with the signs of gardening, canning, and a lifetime of hard work.  My mother's hands were one step removed, still hardworking, but less likely to show the toil of subsistence farming, and more likely to be marked, at various times in her life, with ink from grading papers, paper-cuts from filing documents, stains from prepping produce for market, and nicks and scratches from working with scissors and pins.

My story starts here.  I was in third grade when my mother began to have me help her in the kitchen.  Usually tasks like peeling carrots and dicing celery.  I vividly recall laying my head on my desk during homework later and realizing that my hands still smelled like chopped vegetables.  More importantly, they smelled like my mother and my grandmother.  I had taken my place among the women of my family.   A rite of passage  sounds grandiose, but for me,  it was the first time I could put words around the comforting smell that I knew from my grandmother and my mother's presence when I was sick and needed soothing, or troubled and needed calming, or just needed to be grounded with being here.  The perfume of my family is in carrots and celery and onions.  Years later, watching cooking shows, I would hear that this trio had a culinary name; mirepoix.  All I knew was that it smelled like home, and love, and safe.

What story do my hands tell?  Certainly a more comfortable life than that of my family before me. Don't get me wrong, I have had my share of hard work, but more in the form of summer employment, or brief, in-transition, jobs.  There was the summer when my hands reflected a three-month stint gardening for an exacting home-owner whom liked her grass edges trimmed by hand, with scissors.  All eighteen garden beds.  Weekly.  (Which was about the time it took for garden one to be in need of a trim by the time I had worked my way through bed eighteen.)

There is the year that I worked in a video rental department within a grocery store.  One that held a movie-theater style popcorn machine.   A machine that required the repeated melting of a waxen block of solid fats and chemicals masquerading as buttery topping.  I could not load that pan without inadvertently hitting my hand on the lid, raging hot and grease-covered.  Which frequently led to cursing that I hoped was masked by the now rotating metal blade and  popping of the  and oil-covered dry kernels.

There are the years where my hands were covered with ink, and paper-cuts, and fingernails bitten to the quick.  Hands chapped and dry from frigid winds blowing across lakes in between unyielding brick buildings.  Fingernails caked in clay, and play-dough, crayons, and oobleck as I finished my degree, working and training in a lab school setting.

My hands will tell you very little about my life these days.  My career leaves more imprints on my heart than my hands. And yet, if you come close, and let me hold your hand, you might find that my signature scent is more mirepoix than Chanel.  Some things are simply deeply written in familial code and while I am no longer reliant on my ability to sow, grow and hoe my sustenance, I still find comfort in using my hands to feed my family; their body, senses, and soul.

Now it is time for me to prepare another page in the chapter that is my "right now".  Carrots are to be peeled by Sister Middle, and Sister Big has knife skills that are on the cusp of being independent.  And perhaps tonight, as they drift to sleep, they will also notice the connection that holds their hands with those of their family across time.