Mama's Hands

The first photo is a 3x3 black and white photograph of my mother holding me in her arms outside the rear of our peeling white clapboard house. I’m a chubby baby of about six months. Mama is 40 years old. Her dark brown hair is permed and she’s wearing a dark dress, so it must be a Sunday.

The second photo is of my mother holding my grandson as she’s sitting in her recliner. Josh is lying in her lap. He’s just a little thing, but Mama is 91 years old and lacks the strength to hold him in her arms. Mama’s hair is snow white and thinning, and her pink scalp is visible in places. Yet what I’m drawn to most in this photo are Mama’s hands. The fingers are long and thin. The knuckles and joints are protruded, and there is evidence of the arthritis that has pained her for the past twenty years. The backs of Mama’s hands are covered in age spots and thin blue veins; they are dry like parchment paper and almost translucent.

Mama is touching Josh’s face with the tips of her fingers, and I suspect she’s marveling at how smooth and soft his skin is. I imagine here that she is remembering touching my own face a half century earlier. "Where has the time gone?" she thinks. Perhaps we both know that she won't be around to see Josh start school. Somewhere in between, I’ve given her six grandchildren to hold; my brothers have given her seven more - but perhaps in this moment, her mind is on her own babies – five in total: Roger is the oldest, then James and John - twins who died at birth; next there is me, and eighteen months later, my youngest brother, Ray. If we weren’t enough children to raise, Mama and Daddy adopted two brothers and a sister from the orphanage rather than allow them to be split apart in other foster homes.

Mama was the oldest of twelve children. When she wasn’t laboring in the tobacco fields, she was helping her step-mother raise her brothers and sisters. How many diapers have those hands changed? How many spoons has she held to feed her loved ones? How many hours has she spent washing and ironing clothes, kneading dough for biscuits, sewing clothes and quilts for her family? When Mama had her own children, she milked a goat to feed Roger because he couldn't keep cow's milk down. She raised chickens, skinned rabbits and squirrels because it was the only meat they could afford to feed the family.

Mama’s hands smoothed the linens on the communion tables – linens she washed and ironed; she poured the juice she sliced the communion bread in service to the Lord. Her hands held the Bibles and Sunday school books she read and taught from; and they wrote out the tithe checks no matter how much she needed the money for groceries and prescriptions. Those hands scrubbed floors and walls to keep her home clean. They planted flowers and vegetables, shucked corn, shelled beans, stirred pots, and twisted canning jar lids. Mama’s hands bathed us, buttoned our clothes - clothes that she had sewn herself, and tied our shoes. They bathed and shaved my father after his stroke, and they took care of her sister who suffered from Alzheimers and emphyzema. Those hands were constantly in motion doing what God created a mother’s hands to do.

In the end, I was holding Mama’s hand as she slipped into a coma. Three days later, I was holding her hand when she passed into eternity and took the hand of Christ. My own hands are showing signs of aging. I only hope that my hands will reflect my character as well as Mama’s hands reflected hers.