My mother was not a woman of words, or money, or song. Mary Ellen expressed her Magic through the labor and artistry of her hands. And what exquisite hands they were; long and slender, tanned and freckled with delicately rounded finger tips; the hands of a lady whose place and time put unreasonable demands upon the hands of a lady.
You see, Mary Ellen belonged to the Greatest Generation. A child of Armells Creek, born of the true love of a politician rancher and a poet educator, she was a Montana cowgirl trained as a curious mind to thirst for world travel and dine on fine china. Mary Ellen’s young hands were the hands that carried water home, reined saddle horses, and branded cattle. These were the same hands that mastered penmanship at Trail Creek School and pressed linen for Sunday dinner.
When a weakened heart took her mother in her eleventh year, it was Mary Ellen’s hands that chopped and churned and pressed and scrubbed while her brothers fed and herded and branded and harvested. They kept The Ranch alive while Dad’s office took him to town and away from them. It was the Great Depression. Dad had a steady income. They never wanted for food on their table. They were grateful.
When the leaders of the time called for a World War to stop the tyranny in a foreign land, it was Mary Ellen’s hands that hid her anguish on Christmas Day 1944, when a ship lost in the English Channel took her closest and most beloved brother.
When she came of age, and her father sent her to the university (finishing school), it was Mary Ellen’s hands that earned her degree and set the stage for a teaching career that spanned over four decades. During those early years my mother was free of the domestic servitude of her youth. She sewed the seeds of travel and adventure and romance, especially during the summer of 1948, as my sister and I have recently discovered.
Torn between adventure and providence, my mother’s decision to stay single or marry might have gone either way, but adventure rarely won over providence for the infants of the Great Depression. I’ve wondered where my sister and I might have found Life had my mother surrendered to her wanderlust.
Mary Ellen gave her hand to a man who was neither a politician nor a rancher. She married a salesman. He was a handsome lad whose rawness and charisma often pulled rank over her common sense. When a bus and an icy winter road put my father in a body cast and nearly broke his Spirit, it was Mary Ellen’s hands that sustained us.
Ours was a house overflowing with vegetation. Mary Ellen’s hands filled our windows with blooming African Violets and thumped the lids of Ball jars to be sure they sealed the peaches she had just canned, grown on the trees she tended. Year after year, her garden fed us, and produced an abundance of zucchini, and rhubarb. Every year there was too much zucchini and too much rhubarb. Way too much zucchini and rhubarb… This was an unconscious tradition.
My mother was a master seamstress. The sheer volume of thread Mary Ellen’s fingers commanded would surely circle the globe. When I attached the left sleeve to the right armhole at a thousand stitches per inch, it was my mother’s mastery of the seam ripper that quieted my teenage huff, and gave me a second chance to do it right. There were many times during those years when Mary Ellen’s hands undid the damage of my rush to completion.
When it was my turn to give Life, it was Mary Ellen’s hands that gave my newborn her first independence by severing the cord that bound her to me. As the doctors finished their work, I watched as my little one grasped my mother’s index finger. It was as if they both knew that touching each other would complete a sacred cycle.
Mary Ellen’s hands had been at the wheel of a car only three weeks earlier. Now in her eighty-fifth year and like her mother, her heart had weakened. She and some Great Power had decided this was time that her hands should rest. Those of us facing the void of Life without her were grateful for having had so much time. Still… Time took her too soon. It was still too soon.
In my mother’s final moments, we caressed and stroked and kissed and patted her hands and she was very comfortable basking in this attention. Perhaps we were desperately trying to return the decades of love her hands had given us. Admittedly, we wanted to soak up the beauty of the Life within Mary Ellen’s hands while we still had the chance. As I held one, I searched for words to bridge the gap created by sadness and my own wanderlust. I prayed to know what my mother might need at that moment. The answer came. “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women...” Yes. She squeezed my hand.
In a now quiet room, the rays of a new morning blinded me. This was the first day in my nearly fifty years of Life, that Life did not have my mother in it. As I fiddled with a curl to style her hair as she would want it; I glanced at my own hand, now the custodian of the diamond that illuminated her mother’s hand on the day Mary Ellen was born. In that moment, a light shadow appeared. A light shadow of that same beautiful hand superimposed itself over my hand. At that moment, I knew for sure that Life has no choice but to go on. Now in my own hand, I saw generations of history and the Life of the one who had given Life to me. Yes. In that moment, I was again blessed by the touch of Mary Ellen’s hand.
