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May 18, 2008

THE OFF SEASON: A handful of reasons to take note of our hands

By Mike Lunsford

TERRE HAUTE — I’ve been working in my garden and yard these past few cool, wet weeks, and along with the progress I’ve made with the tilling and raking and mulching has been the satisfaction of seeing my hands toughen, not unlike an old catcher’s mitt that’s been neglected of oil and sweat and spit.

Even a few calluses have been re-introduced to my palms, and I now have to scrub my nails with a brush in the evenings to drive the dirt out from under them. I think those are good things to see.

In the late fall, after I’ve put my rake and shovel and ax in the barn for the winter, my hands begin a gradual decline back to gentility and a life of indoor living.

They don’t take much of a beating in the winter, with the possible exception being extracted by hours with a cheap grading pen gripped in my right hand, perhaps the occasional run-in with sandpaper or firewood or snow shovel.

My hands grow softer in the cold months, more pale, and my grip weakens without the proper exercise of clearing brush or shoveling rock or tossing the occasional bale of hay. Manipulating a keyboard does absolutely nothing at all for the cultivation of the personality of my hands.

I know that it’s been said that our eyes are the windows to our souls, but I’ve always believed that it’s our hands that lead the way in the development of our characters, of our grit and our get-up-and-go. I was raised to believe that a man, or woman, who would offer their hand to you in friendship, in a business transaction, perhaps even in reconciliation, was worth knowing and keeping as a friend. Even though it is my wife who has done the lion’s share of child-rearing in my household, I believe I have taught both my son and daughter that a handshake is supposed to be firm, and that it shouldn’t be offered unless it is honestly given.

Our hands tell others, perhaps more eloquently than our mouths, and certainly with less pretension, where we’ve been and what we’ve done with our years. Two of my friends, one gone now, one very much alive and still strumming his guitar, lost fingers to table saws and tree-cutting fiascoes years and years ago; they had and have two pairs of the most interesting hands I have ever seen.

Herman Huxford, who passed some time ago, was an apostle of the merits of daily work, and I’d be willing to bet that he made a mile of oak baseboard and finished an acre of concrete, all for folks within a five-minute drive of his farm. Herman always said what was on his mind, but he was genuine and he was real.

Jim Trout, a veteran tree cutter who brought down a dying 100-foot sycamore near my house 25 years ago, has always reminded me of Herman Melville’s Ahab, a chainsaw serving as his harpoon. Jim survived a lifetime amid the danger of falling timber, but he still laughs so easily that it solicits grins from everyone he meets. It’s as if there became even more substance to him, and to Herman, too, as their hands yielded precious area to the nemesis of sharpened steel.

Years ago I wrote a literary journal story about the hands of my great-aunt, Grace. She outlived my grandmother by a couple of decades, but Grace’s appearance, and her hands, were so strikingly similar to those of my grandma that to see her was almost painful, nearly frightening. Her hands, like Grandma Blanche’s, were pudgy and soft and gentle. I think my cousin, Renee, inherited those hands; hers have the same look of those that I often saw as a boy when my grandmother sat at the quilting frames or stood at the canning stove or thumbed through a well-worn Bible.

My grandfather Roy’s hands were remarkable, too. They were larger than they should have been for a man who wasn’t so big himself. He had the habit of always pointing at things, of standing at attention for photos with his hands open, his forefingers always askew. The hands that had gripped a pickax in coal mine shafts as a teenager and had dipped enameled pans by the thousands until he walked out of the factory for the last time to retire, could tie the most precise and delicate knots in fishing line I ever saw, and they could gently dig the roots of mature ginseng from the soil while leaving behind the tiny hair-like remnants of younger plants yet to grow. His hands could skin and scale and scour, but they could pat my head, plant corn in arrow-straight rows, and perfectly cast a fly rod.

A week ago, before I headed to my in-laws’ for a Mother’s Day celebration, I stopped in at the cemetery. I was there to lay a few irises — my mom’s favorite flower — on the gravesite she shares with Dad. It most often seems a solemn place, but on this trip I couldn’t help but see their hands in my memories of both of them, and the work they did.

It was so easy to picture her long slender fingers as they kneaded bread dough or darned a sock or turned the pages of a book. With Dad, I saw in my mind’s eye the big freckles on his hands, and the scraped knuckles he consistently wore like badges of honorable labor, just like those described in poet Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” Everything my folks owned, and much of what they gave to us three kids, came as a direct result of their toil and the time spent working with their hands.

Surely, there were slackers and thieves, loafers and losers among my parents and grandparents’ generations; not all were heroic and stoic and uncomplaining. And there’s little doubt that despite computer technology and an easier way of life brought to our doorsteps by hydraulic oil and diesel fuel, interstate highway, jet stream flight and Ethernet cables, many among us still use our hands on a daily basis to turn the soil and hammer nails and to wash our pots and pans.

I’m glad for that. We need to take the time to do things the hard way every once in a while.

Mike Lunsford can be reached by e-mail at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.

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