My right thumb has begun to warn me. Maybe once a week it protests — I pick up a skillet or unscrew a jar of pickles, and my thumb shrieks in pain. Nothing special, but it’s a signal. Bone on bone, my doctor says. As we age, the cushion of cartilage thins, and bone scrapes bone.
My great grandmother, Orah Belle Tuttle Bond, was born on October 15, 1871. She lived in Guernsey County, Ohio, for 101 years. I loved watching her hands, two motions in particular. The first — stringing beans. She’d sit with a bowl of green beans and a colander — with her thumb and index finger she’d top and tail the beans, snapping off the tail, then pulling the string down from the top, unzipping the bean. She’d put them in a big pot of water with a hunk of ham from her smokehouse, and then she’d let those beans boil — delicious!
The second hand movement — we’d cross the road to the barn, where she’d pick up a chicken, and in the blink of my eye, she’d snap its neck. I see her flashing hands, the odd angle of the bird’s broken neck, and then the flurry of rusty feathers as she plucked the chicken. A scary, mesmerizing start to a great chicken dinner.
Grandma Bond’s hands became gnarled, her fingers thick at the joints. She never said so, but I imagine they ached. In her eighties, the backs of her hands showed ropey blue veins under splotchy brown liver spots. Her hands looked like maps, rivers branching, valleys in between.
In her nineties, the ropiness gave way to swelling, the brown mottled skin on the back of her hands stretched taut and shiny. Her bones and veins were less visible, and her hands looked tight, the backs squared off. I remember watching her struggle with the black iron latch on a cupboard door, but her hands never failed her.
She lived alone in a little apartment across from my Aunt Emma’s house in Old Washington. Her hands always served her — even at one hundred, she could make my father’s favorite coconut custard pie; she could reach out to touch her great-great-grandchild’s cheek.
