A CHILDHOOD PERSPECTIVE

Tonight's blog was prompted by massage, you heard right, massage.  My neighbor is dealing with an obscure health issue, called torticollis, that affects everything in her daily life. It came on suddenly and seems to be ganglion of tense nerves that affect the muscles at the base of the neck. This causes her head to drop to the left.  I've been giving her a massage followed by a Celluma treatment (the explanation of which would take too much time to explain here) twice a week and it really has made a difference. After the half hour treatment, I then follow with another massage.

Now, what does all that have to do with tonight's blog?  I guess I'd have to say, everything.  All that massaging had me looking at my hands, such as they are, and remembering:

MY MOTHER’S HANDS
By Patty Lynn

When I was just a little girl I thought my mother’s hands
Were hands that I admired so, in fact, were something grand.
The stand-up veins I loved to trace, so easy to depress…
Left me to hope that someday mine would be like hers, I guess.

As so it happens, time brought change and mother’s hands changed too,
Continued to show signs of age, her knuckles gnarled, askew.
Through grown-up eyes I realized those hands, they told a tale…
Of all those years of mother’s toil, hard work by hands once frail.

Her hands showed some arthritis, though, not rheumatoid, at least.
Her knuckles and her finger joints with swelling had increased...
In what might be described by some deformity of sorts.
Mom had a working woman’s hands which showed that evidence, of course.

The admiration that I felt when I was but a child

Had given way to what they meant, was finally reconciled.
The reason for those gnarled hands was what she daily showed...
In every task she chose to do, her love on us bestowed.

Though gone from us she leaves behind her love, her legacy.
My childhood admiration of her hands has clarity.
For love is shown in many ways, in words and deeds alike,
And when we leave this world behind, the love we’ve shown abides.