Like aged spiders dancing across the web stretched over the loom, the old woman’s hands guide the shuttle into place. The weaving spread before her in vivid colors, a pattern of stars mapped through myth. Yet the weaving, even the loom, fall into shadow to my eyes as the woman’s hands come to the forefront of my awareness.
Questions blast into my consciousness as her fingers skitter across the threads. What is her age? What trials has she encountered? Can these questions be answered by her elegant hands?
The bones are prominent, her age evident by the tissue-thin skin draped across the core of her hands. Her wrists are puffed from years of use. Streaming from her swollen wrists are the bones leading towards her fingers. Here is her strength. Like rods of iron, the bones support her clawed fingers. The fingers are riddled with arthritis, joints engorged by years of hard work.
Stretched over the skeletal structure of the expressive hands is the skin. The initial appearance of the skin is of toughened leather that had weathered sun and rain, trials and ease. Yet, upon closer inspection, the skin becomes translucent. The toughened leather becomes delicate, breakable silk. Browned with years of sun, her hands are riddled with age spots and ancient wrinkles. Her long fingernails are crooked and chipped. They, like her skin, are brown with age. Beneath that delicate tissue are rolls of veins, their color lost beneath the ancient brown.
Age, indefinable. Trials, numerous. Hands, as eloquent as time itself.
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