I look at them and she is right. Her fingers are stubby and with wrinkles that bunch over her knuckles.
That didnt stop you, I say, remembering how she played us to sleep with Debussy and Brahms. Feeling generous, I decide a is in order. I like your manicure. It matches that dress.
She swipes her turquoise nails in my direction. I think they look pretty, shiny as scarab beetles in the morning sun.
I dont give a rats ass about manicures. The whole time growing up did you ever see me get a manicure?
She is right again. She was never one to be concerned with appearances. But, stubbornly, I cant let it go.
That I was one of the first women to get my Masters of Psychology at UBC that I advocated for early childhood education so single mothers could work that I was handing out birth control pills to girls on campus before pills were legal that I was a member of the Right to Die with Dignity Association and its charter was signed in our living room that I attended lectures on campus until I was 87. That I travelled the world! Saved our rivers!
Having said her piece, she drifts off like an astronaut on her personal orbit. Dementia has long ago stolen her away. I go back to writing about hands.
My mothers hands were not the best. But once I watched her at the kitchen table, stretching strudel dough as thin as a butterflys wing. Another time, she showed me how to make a bed with hospital corners. The palm of one hand could tell a fever from a false alarm; both hands, working in tandem, clapped at a thousand concerts and plays. She could coax a raspberry, ripe as a ruby, off its stem. Usually they smelled of Palmolive dish soap, those hands. When tucking me into bed one night, they smelled of something peculiar.
I look up and see my mother glaring at me from her one good eye. I scratch out everything I just wrote.
