Hands

I don't think she ever got a manicure in her life.

I'll have to ask. Grandmom's fingers were twisted from arthritis, red from ten thousand pans of hot dish water and heavy pan lifting. At market, she expertly knuckled tomatoes and peppers, gingerly held up ginger and mushrooms to muster eye-level confirmation of her digital inspection, and in kitchen she still firmly grasped the very well-honed chef's blade.

She left Mom her knives. The tines are still good. The handles have seen better days, and the 10" blade is now probably 8-1/2", with the thickest part sharpened down to barely more than a paring knife. But it cuts.

Everything made it through multiple uses. Plastic bags ended up rinsed, inverted on the dish drain or hanging by clips from a line. Paper towels, rung out, draped over cups. Tin foil was crinkled and wrinkled, folded and creased before being replaced in a drawer. New towels sat unused in the drawer, so each visit one or another of us would spirit an old one out when she wasn't looking. They had no fluff left, no absorbancy. They weren't even good for washing cars or dogs.

The knuckle tips on her right hand were askew perhaps 30 degrees from the main digits. From scrubbing? Gripping? When she curled it around the scotch tumbler she had me pour - "two fingers, dear - you're having a drink too, aren't you?" she left no doubt that the glass would remain firmly grasped, whatever the color or angle of her fingers.

At 93 she finally let loose her grip, before I would. As she lay in the bed at CHOMP, many of her offspring milling around the waiting area, children hanging over the benches to look at the koi in the indoor pond, adults doing the low-volume huddles here and there, seated in the neutral-colored fabric chairs, I took my turn at bedside. My aunt, a physician, patiently explained to my younger son what each of the tubes were for. "What's this?" he'd chirp, one after another, fascinated at the dials and fluids and, oh, GG, who was awake and smiling. I gripped her hand and looked at her face and she said, finally, you can let go, when it appeared I wouldn't.

I think she smiled. It would make sense if she smiled. I'll remember it that way, arrange her lips and mouth just so, put the words in her voice, in my mind's ear. We'll hear the timbre and the silence and feel goosebumps and it may as well be her hands that held mine and let go, finally, when they finally let go.

Joshua Tree

The Joshua tree stationed next to the driveway sagged in the Victorville summer heat. If he could stand tall. If he could, like his brethren who hopscotched across the desert floor, but here roots were cramped by cement, and instead he crouched like he would spring free at any moment. But he never did. And the crouch became a slouch.

His was a crown of crow diadems.

Red velvet curtains lined the living room window. Every morning he greeted them as they faded from black into blood. Faintly, he once heard them referred to as hooker drapes, then laughter. The brown haired human who turned the lights on and off, and who every few days dripped a water drink on the brown dirt, that would be her laugh.

He did not have hands.

He did not have fingers to brush her soft cheeks, or a mouth to speak with. Only his many arms could stiffly wave, when fickle Wind chose to visit. Not so fickle, perhaps: the human brought out a stick with thin twigs and brushed away his fallen skin, which Wind would shake free on her visits. His skin, once green, then yellow, then brown, would snap free and flutter. They could be butterflies, if they could fly upwards, couldn't they?

His other skin was also his tongue and nose and ears and armor. Its name sounded nothing like the voice of the black and white creature who squatted and made water and who had a mouth. He had skin that fell away and drank the sun and changed colors, and he had skin that had long memory and was constant and rough.

If he had had fingers that could have caressed her cheek, he would have found it soft as the underside of a new leaf. For her kind, she was old. Sometimes her acorns came to visit, parking their cars on the cement shoe that kept him contained. They would slink past him on the walkway carrying bags and boxes, commenting on the drapes, on the bright, on the dry air. He knew their names. When she watered his roots, she talked to him, words tumbling from her human mouth. Without a tongue, he became adept with his bark ears and listened.

Once when she was young with child she had sailed across the blue water and landed among dark haired people. There she had more young with black-brown hair, five in total who knew of each other. If there were others that didn't breathe, well, he had no mouth to speak for them. He listened as the bombs fell and rose in her voice, between the tinkle of water splashing from leaves to earth. He heard the march of millions of feet, and the grumbling hunger from millions of mouths, and he was curious why they didn't just turn skin into leaves and drink the sun?

She stayed with him for a number of turns. He was not old for his kind; trees don't count so much as live. He paid no attention to the flickering box that somehow deafened all the people. He didn't use soap, and if he was happy, it was when the damp earth cozened his skin and he could stretch another few leaves into the sky, and breathe in the wind and the sun and the sharp stars who kept him company in the dark.