Hands
My grandfather’s hands were sun-kissed brown, holding unto the quality of both age and youth. The flesh of his hands, chubby and smooth mismatched with wrinkles brought on by the sun and old age. His hands always moved so slowly, we always wondered how they accomplished so much. He would leave for the place we lovingly called the Quinta long before we woke up. On days I wanted to meet up with him, I would hike up the woodland path and arrive where the stone wall opened to the farmhouse. The second I crossed that threshold into the land he cultivated, my breath would deepen and my heart would lighten. There was something about his relationship with the land that changed the molecules of the air.
My eyes danced between his hands and the lush landscape around him. His hands blended into the trees and dirt, they were no longer human but an extension of the natural world itself. It seemed that they moved as slowly as a warm summer day. Nevertheless, every plant and tree he touched flourished, and all the work seem accomplished at the day’s end. In the Portuguese language, there are two words for garden. One for a flower garden, Jardin, and the other for a vegetable garden, Horta. My grandmother would marvel that her husband's vegetable garden looked like a jardin.
My grandfather was a stark contrast to my grandmother, she had words and stories, he had hands and silence. Her hands are slim and mystical, an almost windy quality to them, light-skinned and wrinkled by the passing of time. I hold up my own hand to hers and they are nearly the same shape and size. Her light brown eyes look back at mine and twinkle, she is always bursting at the edges with fire. “You have a midwife’s hands” she tells me, I sit perplexed. I don’t know what it means, but I take it as a compliment.
My grandfather remained quiet, as the long hours outside turned his skin sunset brown and he faded into the trees. A soul that is tethered to the natural world often feels uncomfortable in the confines of four walls. He could never stick around home very much. After lunch, he would leave the house and make his way to the town square. Under the shade of a tree, his hands shuffled an old deck of playing cards. He would sit there with his friends, playing cards and telling jokes until the sun’s intensity softened and he could make his way back to the land. His friends, all farmers, belonged to the land nearly as much as he did. There are people who study books to learn the secrets of nature. Then there are those who are so intertwined with the natural world that it never occurs to them that nature has secrets. For they have known the land for as long as they have known the very palms of their hands.
In the evening he would return home, hands always carrying some long-lost fruit of the earth with them. Peaches that would send their juices overflowing down to my elbows, a darkened plum, a handful of red cherries, a dusty potato accompanied by a hearty laugh. He would sit at the kitchen table after dinner where I was practically forbidden from making choices about which fruit to eat. He would always stop me and pick out the best option and hand it to me. His brown eyes beaming with pride and his hands holding a knife and carving into today’s abundance.
I will look for those hands everywhere for as long as I live. For they were the salt of the earth, the definition of love, the definition of humble. My grandfather’s hands did not work the earth. Instead, they did a silent reverent dance, and both the earth and his hands transformed. I look down at my own hands, typing on the keys, thin and fragile and mine. Midwife hands as my grandmother calls them, young and aching to birth their own kind of alchemy. For life transforms our hands, yet hands, when they move steadily, slowly, and with purpose, transform our lives.
My grandfather picking kale in his winter garden.
My grandmother picking tilia (linden) to dry for tea.
My grandfather’s hands picking kale and then tending to the aloe vera plants that he planted inside my grandmother’s old cooking pots.
My grandfather proudly displaying the tomatoes he had grown.
My grandfather watering a garden bed he is preparing for planting.