Hands

When a cadaver is used for research or study purposes, apart from the face which is covered or excluded, its hands are removed.

Few people even think about them, but hands are so immensely personal and hold so much of one's humanity that they have to be removed so that the medical student can work on a cadaver, not a person. It's often only in death that one realises the humanity of another's hands.

I've always loved hands, love looking at them. They say so much and so little about the person at the same time. They live the person's life for them. They speak for the person when they don't open their mouth.

The first real crush I had was on the most talented pianist I know. He had beautiful hands with long, slender fingers. They looked so delicate yet held so much strength in them and created so much magic. It was his hands I fell for first. Through the years since, I've realised this is the type of hands that I like best, and when I see hands like that, I always wonder what it would be like to have them touch me.

Gnarled hands. Cold hands. Sweaty hands. Delicate hands. Big hands. Hairy hands. Thin hands. Short hands (like mine). Six-fingered hands. Freckled hands. Brown hands. They all draw my eyes to them.

I took the above picture of Sean's hands when we were on a road trip in November of 2004. His hands have always intrigued me and I fell in love with them the first time I saw them, tiny and wrinkly as he wrestled them free from his swaddling cloth in the hospital where he was born in August of 2003.

Small babies do strange, wonderful things with their hands. They seem to be perpetually amazed at their own fingers and play with them every chance they get. (And they flip you off surprisingly often, hopefully without realising it.) Sean, too, always played with them, staring at them in wonderment, turning them this way and that. Till today, I love to take his little hands in mine and feel how smooth and soft they are, how small they feel in my hands, and feel the way his fingers curl around mine. I love it even when he takes it into his head to dig his fingernails into my palm just for the heck of it.

On the same road trip, my sis was less pleased about having her picture taken. Her hands are self-explanatory.