a loving memoir of hands...
Here’s to honoring February’s celebration of love and Black history.
So how does love begin?
Perhaps it springs from the memory of our mother’s hands, their wakefulness to perform ordinary and tender daily acts of care upon us.
I’m reminded of the first time I met my maternal grandmother’s mother, each of us sizing one another up in search of shared resemblances that survived the genetic journey across generations.
I was about three years old, and it was the experience of her hands that gave birth to a resolute insight embodied in eu2be today—that beauty is love’s closest companion.
She was short and stout, brown skin, modest, hardworking, with the sweetest Southern accent and sing song voice that punctuated conversations with “say what chile?”
Her hands were small with short fingers. They scrubbed clothes, washed dishes, and kneaded the most delicious biscuits I had ever tasted.
They moved with deft expertise performing with such precision, letting me know right then and there that our bodies and hands have an intelligence of their own, deserving of our attention and admiration.
Her hands made all of kinds of beautiful things—she sewed aprons (see enclosed) and quilts filled with cotton bolls straight from the field.
They showed me how to pick berries and can them in Mason jars. All the while, we exchanged stories of our respective lives, hers instructing me of the why’s and how’s of our fun home economics projects.
She looked upon me with a mixture of curiosity and loving pride, inquiring about my thoughts and city life up north. I obliged with responses that must have sounded like little freedom stories, bearing no resemblance to her experience of survival in sharecropper’s Alabama.
It was new and so adventurous for me. It would be much later, when I was in college, that I realized—my grandmother and I travelled to visit her on a segregated train…
What I understood then and so appreciate today was the precious good fortune of having the experience of her and her talented hands.
In addition to guiding mine through various crafts, her hands bathe me in a portable metal tub in her kitchen, heated by a wood fire stove. They lifted me up and took measures to guard my vanity and then they did what most black children experience as part of loving care, she slathered all of my skin with a mixture of who knows what. It felt like oils, Vaseline and lotion.
Did she know the science of her handmade concoction? Probably not. But as someone who has formulated award-winning products, it was a balanced trifecta of occlusive, emollient and humectant moisturizing goodness.
Her daily life was attended by labors of all kinds. She had no gloves for hand washing the dishes, nor did she have manicure appointments. And it never occurred to me that her hands were anything but beautiful, fascinating and marvelous.
Here's to you and your loving hands mama Corrine.♥️
