Monday, February 23, 2015

les mains.



nicky said she had beautiful feet.

i had no idea what beautiful feet were, so he went on describing things to me so well that now i cannot go round without appreciating the aesthetic quality of anyone's feet. i liked my own hands well enough, with their longer fingers from my white grandfather coming out of their wider palms from my brown grandfather. that are not beautiful hands, but they get the job done and do not resemble sausages before or after cooking. asians have beautiful hands. this is a generalization of course, but true more often than not.

grant had rough hands. i suppose he was a real man from a time when real men worked with their hands, knew what do do with every tool in their garages, and would be lost in the moisturizer section of the nearest grocery store. turns out grant never used moisturizer. and she remembers her baths as a small child and the rough scrub from his hands on her perfect skin. he was a great father.

i came home one day from school to the house my dad had built with few tools and less money, and he was moisturizing his hands. they had cracked at every single crease. it was a wet and cold autumn that year when he secured a position as a labourer on the same crew he had employed to close in the house of his dreams before winter came. he bought a yellow raincoat with navy blue corduroy around the collar. he bought steel toe work boots with a green CSA triangle patch on the side. he worked in the rain, sloughing liquid concrete and bags of sand or mortar, until the boss called him in. his hands cracked. he went to bed early. and we were always warm.

my mother never paints her fingernails. deep reds and garish greens and the odd pink or powder blue have started decorating her toes, but only now, in her grandmother years, in her big house, mostly finished and nearly empty of all of us. painted nails would never do as she cares for the sick and medically needy. painted nails would chip on firewood at the furnace or the copper-bottom pots in the steel sink under the window. there is little time for painting nails when you've an entire world to put before your own whims.

time to get to work.

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