My Mother’s Fingers
My mother’s twisted fingers guided fabrics with woven plaid or striped patterns under the presser foot of her Pfaff sewing machine. She sewed flat felled seams throughout my blouses and aligned the breast pockets so their pattern matched the fabric beneath them. She left no raw edges. By contrast, the A line skirt that I made in home economics hung like Spanish moss. I recall that it took longer for me to rip out my sewing than it took my mother to redo it.
The same swollen fingers tightly wound foil wrapped strands of my hair around metal rods that she soaked with the permanent wave solution. I became a hot head and acrid fumes filled the kitchen. When she unwound the rods, each section of hair resembled the coiled cord of our landline phone. After shampooing, she’d towel dry my hair. Twirling sections around an invisible axis she created tidy concentric circles secured with two crossed bobby pins that poked my scalp as I tried to sleep.
My mother used her fingers for making perfect gohan, the cooked sticky rice that Japanese prefer. To the lidded pot, she added well-rinsed rice to the depth of her first finger joint and added water to the second knuckle. This recipe insured that the starchy water wouldn’t boil over into the burner cover of the gas range. It also kept the resultant cooked rice soft with just a thin layer of okoge, the scorched crunchy layer of rice on the bottom of the pot. My father savored okoge. When I tried to follow my mother’s instructions using my longer fingers, I made a messy stove and mushy rice.
My mother’s fingers showed me how to deadhead pansies, dahlias, and roses. Dirt would accumulate under her fingernails as she showed me how to extract dandelions with tap root intact using a forked tool my father had created from a flat head screwdriver. To remove chickweed from her flower beds, her thumb and forefinger dug beneath the surface of the damp soil and yanked the roots out. After gardening, she’d wash her hands using an old toothbrush to remove grains of soil from beneath her nails. After I broke my wrist several years ago, I realized how challenging gardening can be. Digging dandelions became hand therapy for me.
Now in my eighth decade, my gray hair is short and straight. My fingers resemble my mother’s with gnarled knuckles that swell more as the barometric pressure drops. As I learn about her incarceration during World War II, I better understand the anger that she expressed when pain and dysfunction prevented her from sewing and gardening. Her arthritis, gout, and osteoporosis took away her mobility with no chance of “indefinite leave” from incarceration again. Holding her hands and gently rubbing those fingers while she was in hospice care, I glimpsed my future.