For Matt, who is handy at most things, and master of many.
He sat at the kitchen table as he waited for the kettle to boil and clasped his hands in his lap. They looked as if he had forgotten to take off his gardening gloves, the material all clumped up and saggy, bunched at the knuckles and loose across the back of his hands. Elephant hands, his grandkids called them, he recalled with a chuckle, all wrinkled and knobby like the knees of a well-travelled pachyderm.
He thought of all that his hands could do, clever hands that could carve a rose from a radish or plane down the top of a dresser to a fair-thee-well, hands that could shuffle and deal a deck of cards in a thrice or bang out a fair rendering of “In the Mood” on the piano.
And all that they had given him, the pleasure of brushing his wife’s cheek as they gazed at a harvest moon, the squeeze of his daughter’s tiny fist as they walked home from the corner store, slurping ice cream cones, the grasp of the mainsheet in one hand and the tiller in the other as he tacked into the harbour on his sailboat.
And the glory of their strength, wielding an ax or ripping off some pull ups…
He felt twinge in his hands that resolved to an aching throb, and rubbed his hands gently, hands with knuckles swollen from arthritis. He’d had to leave off making furniture, not enough good days, and the sailboat was gone now. But he didn’t regret any of that, because he realized that mostly what his hands had offered him was a connection to everything and everyone around him, a way to give love with a gift or a touch, and he could still do that.
The kettle shrieked urgently, and he shook off his musings and rose to make tea. He took the steaming mug to the other room and set it on the end table beside his wife, leaning in to give her a kiss and brush her cheek.
Kevin Love, January 2021
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