My grandmother's hands are brown and wrinkled, like a map of rivers that have been flowing for eighty years. When I was small, I used to trace the lines with my finger and ask her where each one went.
"This one," she would say, pointing to a deep crease across her palm, "goes back to the farm where I grew up, where I picked cotton until my fingers bled." Then she would point to a thin white scar on her thumb. "And this one leads to the night I learned to cook for eight brothers and sisters."
Her hands have kneaded thousands of loaves of bread. They have stitched every quilt in our house and plaited my hair before every first day of school. They once caught my baby brother when he slipped from the top of the slide, faster than anyone thought an old woman could move.
These days her hands shake a little when she holds her teacup. Sometimes she drops a stitch and has to start a row again. But when she takes my hands in hers, they are still the strongest hands I know.
