I was caught
by the sight of my own hands trimming pastry last week as my husband and I made
apple pies. I have come late to pastry making, even though I started baking
when I was ten years old, I only started baking pies last year. Despite the
late start, it seemed that my hands instinctively knew how to mix, roll out and
trim the pastry. They knew this from the countless times I watched my mother do
it.
I remember
when she saw the picture and lamented her ‘old’ hands; with fingers that won’t
completely straighten out any more, perhaps remembering her mother's hands in her later years. But I don’t see that, I see hands that have have
performed countless tasks from the most basic to the most beautiful.
A mother’s
hands are usually the first one to tend you… change your diaper, feed you… the basics
of life: food and clothing. One of my
earliest memories is of my mother reading to me; her hands held books before I was
capable of holding them on my own and inspired in me a lifelong love affair
with reading.
My mother
was in many ways typical of mothers of her generation: she baked, cooked,
cleaned, sewed, knit, gardened, pickled, preserved etc. Her hands were
constantly busy. She taught her children many of those skills and we can all do
some of them, although not one of us does all of them. What was not typical was
that she also worked outside the home much of our growing up years, continually
mastering new workplace skills, with both head and hands.
In my mother’s
retirement she took up cross-stitch, creating beautiful works of art, inspiring
all four of her daughters to do so as well. She embraced the world of the
internet, first getting a laptop to keep in touch with us while they wintered
in Florida, learning the intricacies of the internet, then an e-reader and now
an Ipad mini.
Most recently
my mother’s hands have tended my father as he underwent treatment for throat and
tongue cancer, cleaning the open wound, organizing his nutritional intake
through the feeding tube and probably countless tasks to which I haven’t been privy.
So, when I look
at my mother’s hands, I don’t see old hands; I see hands that taught me
countless things, hands that gave and received love, hands that reveal a life of
blessing and challenge, hands that reflect a life well lived and loved.
And that’s
my window on God's world.
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