Saturday, December 5, 2015

Grandma’s Touch

(Excerpt from this year's NANOWRIMO, inspired by Bethany)

Grandma always had a way with her hands. She touched everything. Her hands were always sensitive to textures, patterns, variations.

When Matt was younger and kept his hair close-cut, she would run her fingers against the grain of his hair to feel the tension of hair strands going counterculture. This caused her to giggle.

“Going on a treasure hunt, x marks the spot. Three lines down and a question mark. A pinch, a squeeze, a tropical breeze. An egg that spills and gives you the chills.” This childhood ditty was followed by fingers drawn on the back to mark the treasure hunt, an “x” drawn to mark the spot where some treasure was inevitably hiding. I never figured out what that prize was all about, but I typically imagined some pirate’s bounty. The three lines drew straight down one’s back and the pinch was a slight irritation, the squeeze, a firm grip on a chunk of flesh. The tropical breeze was a puff of breath into one’s ear. The egg started with a cracking of a shell on top of one’s head and then fingers cascading down one’s head and shoulders and back to create a spilling of the yoke effect. It was sure to bring chills and shivers down even the most determined straight-faced bloke. We loved it.

Grandma taught us the bad habit of molding our fingers in the wax from melting candles. While they were lit, she plunged her hand into melted and softened wax pools, cradling the flame, and squeezed them into shapes and patterns.


She also dared to discover to us the “soft blanket” feeling of running your finger through a candle flame. She would gently swing her finger back and forth through a burning flame as we gathered around the table on a holiday meal. She claimed it felt soft, like a blanket. We cautiously and incompletely believed her and began our own test of this to prove or disprove her credibility. She was right. There was some sort of softness to the burning orange flame. Mom wasn’t crazy about this discovery and our infatuation with it. 

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