Posted: Feb 17, 08 12:09pm

Because she is with me today. I don't know why. Perhaps because the sun is traveling into Pisces. Her birthday was March 7, mine March 18.

Her Hands

I expect they were beautiful when she was young. But I remember my mother’s hands best after the lithium took hold and puffed them into something like miniature baseball mitts. Her wedding band, scarred gold with three unremarkable ruby chips, sank down into the flesh of her finger and almost disappeared into the groove. It had to be cut off by the morgue attendant when she passed. I asked for it. I wanted it though it had no value—other than as a trigger for a thousand memories.

My mother’s hands were capable, not pretty. They metered out grace and compassion and an equal measure of mayhem and violence. They were as at home wrapped around a floury rolling pin as they were a gin bottle. Once when I was 16 she wrapped her right hand around a carving knife and chased me through the house, screaming in her drunken rage that she would kill me. “You bitch, you little bitch,” she shrieked as my brother stood frozen, hiding behind a door. “How terrible,” you say, “your own mother.” Maybe. That was her madness. But those same hands wiped my tears, kept me from countless small harms, tucked me in at night, poured orange juice in the morning, helped me become a princess, a cowgirl, a hobo at Halloween. One of them held one of mine as we crossed a busy Fresno street on our way downtown, two ladies—one grown, one pretending—wearing winter coats and polished shoes and hats, off to shop at the department store and see a movie, like girlfriends.

Those hands lit a thousand Parliament cigarettes, stabbed my father with a fork at the dinner table, made snail curls of my hair and tucked them against my head with bobbie pins, washed my father’s hair when he became too weak and fragile to bathe without help. Her hands, capable and terrifying.

My own are shaped like hers, square and small with blunt-tipped fingers.

The wedding ring, in two halves, lives in a small leather box a friend brought back from Guatemala. I don’t open the box often, but once in a while I take the two halves of gold and hold them, remembering.