My Grandmother's Hands

I have very few actual memories of my paternal grandmother. For most of the time we both walked this planet, we lived 200 miles apart. We'd meet briefly when our family came to the city for a visit with relatives, but neither had anything in common with the other, besides my father. I was, after all, the younger child of one of her youngest sons in a very big family. 

When Mom was too sick to care for me, the year I attended kindergarten in Minneapolis, I wasn't "allowed" to bother Grandma. I was officially staying with my aunt, uncle, and my two much older adopted cousins in a huge house. The upper floor was rental apartments for proper young ladies attending school or working at very proper jobs before marriage. That's how it was back then. All I saw was the outside stairs I was never allowed to climb. The basement apartment where Grandma lived had its own street entrance,  the front room of which was all I was allowed in to see, and then only on rare instances when I visited Grandma with my aunt. In all that time, my memories are of the other people, the house, the very small yard, and a young neighbor boy I played outside with who soon died from leukemia. I hadn't known kids could die.

I was barely aware of the babies my aunt fostered briefly, one after another, until they died of spina bifida. Looking back I suppose she rather enjoyed an older child for a while who wasn't in the process of dying. She taught me to write my name, tie my shoes, set the table, and cross the street safely by minding the stoplights to walk to kindergarten. Smells made impressions, like the bars of Ivory soap throughout the house. Mom didn't buy that brand. My uncle, home on disability retirement from the police force with severe arthritis in his hands, smelled of the bowl of pennies which he let me play with, an aid to learning to count and add or just make patterns on the floor with, and of the cigars he smoked. My cousin Marilyn "let" me make her bed for her each morning so she had time to get ready to leave for high school. I was really proud of having learned how to do it well and loved the praise. I think we had a pact that in return for letting me do that for her, it was OK for me not to tell her mom that I was, since "I might get in trouble" if I did. Or something like that. We got along that way.

There is one exception to the dearth of memories. I was outside, playing with a doll and her buggy, when Grandma came out and soon noticed I hadn't put my doll's panties on under her dress in my hurry to get outside. Scandalized, she scolded me soundly, sending me back inside to correct the  situation immediately. I tried to argue that it didn't matter since she was only a doll and had nothing to really cover, which only made everybody angry with me. How dare I argue with Grandma! The unfairness of that has rankled through the decades, though I do understand where they all were coming from. In a conversation with that aunt when she was in a nursing home but still very lucid, she shared with me the tale of her being molested when she was very, very young by a neighbor and his son who were supposed to be babysitting her in an emergency. Instead they created an emergency and left my aunt unable to bear her own children. Of course as a 5 year old, nothing of that was allowed to filter into my awareness. Even my father never heard the real reason his sister needed to adopt her family. Those things just weren't discussed.

When I was older, somewhere between third and maybe 8th grade, this same grandmother came to our small house in a small town to stay with our family. It was "our turn" to take care of her. I believe she stayed about a year. My biggest awareness was of my brother having to give up his main floor bedroom and move into my enormous bedroom that covered most of the second floor. She couldn't handle the stairs to come join me.  It was an uncomfortable arrangement, but we were not allowed protest of course.

I cannot accurately place when the discussion about her hands took place. At some point I noticed that her hands had lots of brown spots on them, the skin was wrinkled all over, and blue veins stood up from the level of the rest of her hands. Being very young, I'd never noticed an old person's hands before this. Being clueless, as I was about so many things in my early years since nobody found the time to explain the world to me unless I was misbehaving in it, I asked her about why her hands looked like that.  Everybody laughed at me, and one of them - who knows which one? - informed me that mine were going to look just like that when I grew old. I looked at my hands, then back at hers. In my youthful arrogance and with a complete failure of imagination, I insisted I'd never have hands that looked like that! Of course this only garnered more ridicule.

I've been looking at my hands more these days. Brown spots are appearing. Wrinkles too, especially as there is now the same amount of skin covering a little less hand than recently before, and almost no elastin left to correct for that. I've been using them a fair amount these last couple years, working with metals in various forms along with tools and machines needed to make jewelry, so most recently I've noted some of the vessels popping up over the otherwise mostly flat geography of the back of my hands. They are quite blue, and don't even match, one of my hands to the other.

My hands? What am I saying? These are my grandmother's hands!