I Long To Touch Your Genius Hands

In the kitchen, my hands become my mother's.

It sounds unusual, I know--but somewhere in there, they transform. I pull off the ring [my mother's mother's] on my right hand and reach, over the sink, to put it on the ledge. And there--if you squint--are my mother's rings too, on the ledge of the window in the kitchen of my childhood home.

They are most hers when I am preparing pans for baking--I remember the first time they transformed. I read the recipe, it told me to grease the pans for baking, to flour them. So, instinctively--without pausing--I pulled off one square of paper towel, swiped it into a stick of shortening and wound it around the edges of the metal pan. Then sprinkled in a palm full of flour and upended the pan, shaking and turning until everything was coated. Just like that--my hands, my mother's.

But when I'm sifting flour--something my mother never does--my hands are my grandmother's. My sifter isn't nearly as old as hers; it still have that new appliance sheen and I am young yet. But I tap the sides to break up the last clumps. My grandmother's hand, mine.

Pouring liquid from bottle to bottle, shaking it back and forth to dissolve chemicals--writing structures and equations, my hands are my father's. Not quite yet as bitten up by acids and bases [maybe I'm more careful, maybe I'm lucky, maybe I'm just young], but his.

And curled around pipettes, holding them still and being proud. Proud that I'm not shaking, that I never shake when I hold them. These are Ryan's hands--passed down when he took out his marker and wrote my name on pieces of lab tape, when he wrapped them around the plastic and handed them to me. The pieces of tape that outlasted him, the weirdest sweetest last will and testament. His hands, my hands, our pipettes.

Yes, most of the time, they are mine--writing, typing, driving. Drawing them up to the edge of Joey's face or clenching them into a fist and sending them into the ribs or sternum of whichever boy is vexing me. All night, in the morning--they are mine. But sometimes, sometimes. Sometimes, something else.