Hands

As I sit and ponder the different messages that my aging hands are giving me, it brings me back to a young girl, watching my grandmother, (on my fathers side) making her home made biscuits. Pushing and pulling the sticky dough with her small and wrinkled hands, all the time wondering why both of her pinky fingers are crooked, almost to the shape of fish hooks.  Now I know, as I have been watching my own pinkys curl over the past ten years. Waking every morning to the tightening feeling that only subsides after a few agonizing stretches and holding atleast two cups of steaming coffee. At that same young girl age, I can picture my other grandmothers hands. Her long thin fingers that were permanently stained blue from the years of dying the smelly cow hides at the tannery down the street.  Mind you, my fingers have never been blue, but I have her fingers.  The strong, thin fingers, with flaking dry skin, that comes from many years of working with moisture draining leather. I refused to work at the local tannery after watching her, but I did end up sitting in front of an industrial sewing machine for a lengthy nine years. Tugging and pulling at every variance of shoe the company decided to make. My hands have made a definite improvement from the "shoe shop days", I absolutely adore my perfectly manicured fingernails, although I spend money that I don't have, to make them this way. Just the perfect length, with a different eye catching and spirit lifting color every other week. But as I look, there's still the tattered skin around them. Skin reflecting the many years of hard work, and the bad habbit that I had as a teenager, of chewing my fingernails.  I managed to drop the habbit of chewing the nails, but somehow find it impossible to ignore the slightest imperfection in the skin around them.  Leading to ending an evening of  watching television on the couch, only to end with the realization that I have managed to make myself bleed. My hands have many stories to tell, too many to remember.  I can say that I will make it a point to study them again in ten years.  Maybe there will be stories of white sandy beaches, or a mountain stream, but I will always remember the ones about my grandmothers.