My Grandma's Hands

This morning I looked down and thought,"I have Grandma's hands." In more ways than one. Yes, I am now a grandma, and I do love working with my hands. I had just finished crocheting an afghan for my grandson (by special request) and moved on to knitted sparkly scarf for a granddaughter. So that's literally true, but my thoughts were more along the lines of how my hands resemble my grandmother's - wrinkled, translucent skin that is dotted with age spots, holding knitting needles.

At my age, Grandma Kate would have been knitting as she sipped her mid-morning coffee, just as I was doing. And she drank it black; so do I. I can still see her sitting in her chair, a ball of yarn and her current project in her lap, with her coffee cup and her latest book on the end table next to her. She was a voracious reader, much as her father had been, and they both passed that on to me. You'll often see me with a book in my hands.

Grandma Dewall drank her morning coffee standing up as she bustled about the kitchen. She introduced me to coffee at about age 5. Well, I should say warm coffee-flavored milk. But the older I got, the less milk the mug contained. Around the age of 12 I must have been grown up in her eyes, because that's when she started handing me cups of black coffee. (Grandma Kate was doling out the white wine at the same time, but that's another story.)

As an adult I drank it with cream for many years, but at some point I tried black coffee again, and that's still the way I drink it. (Okay, I will admit to occasionally splurging on a flavored creamer, but mostly what's in my cup is black, though far darker than either of those women were used to.) My coffee is dispensed from my programmable coffee maker with its own grinder using organic rain forest coffee beans instead of ground Folgers brewed on the stove a glass percolator, but the mug in my hands still brings back memories of coffee in Grandma Dewall's kitchen. Sometimes I smile when I think of her when I take my first sip of the morning. In the kitchen. But I sit, because my grandma's legs complain a little.

They say that women turn into their mothers, but in my case it skipped a generation, because I have become my grandmother. Correction - grandmothers. And while physically I bear a strong resemblance to my dad's mother, it's more than just DNA and what I look like. These women somehow came together in the woman I grew to be, which is understandable since I spent so much of my formative years with each of them. They had strong influences on how I learned to live and think. And they taught me how to show people I loved them by using my hands. (Not just for hugs and affectionate pats.)

Grandma Kate and Grandma Dewall couldn't have been more different, except that both of them grew up on farms, learning how to work hard and how to take care of their families with their hands. They passed their various skills and their ways of loving on to me, partly by instruction, partly by example, but mostly by allowing me to be with them as I grew up.

I was a city-raised child, but by the time our children were starting school, my husband and I decided it was time for a different lifestyle. Our children were raised on a farm, just like my grandmothers were. And they're all good with their hands. Another story for another day.

I have far more memories of times with my grandmothers during my childhood than of those with my mother. She was pretty occupied with raising several small children, and I often was sent to one grandmother's house or the other to get out of her hair. I was the oldest; translate that into troublemaker, instigator, bad influence, and general mischief maker. Yes, I was a wild child (still am), but that's a tale reserved for the future.

I was born in 1955, an unexpected child of just-out-of-high school teens. It was smack in the middle of the baby boomer era, and my parents did their best to comply with 'baby boomer.' Eventually their were five of us - four in quick succession, and then a few years' break before my youngest sister Suzanne came along, also unexpectedly.We were all unplanned, now that I think about it. No, we weren't Catholics, just prolific Lutherans.

I can still feel the silky texture of the flour when Grandma Dewall let me plunge my hands into it to help her scoop flour with a tea cup. Both grandmas were from-scratch bakers, aghast at the idea of using mixes. (Time permitting, it's still my preferred method.) My mom was more prone to reach for Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines. Her cupboards contained lots of boxed mixes. Bisquick was her go-to starter for many of her regular supper menus, and I don't think she ever iced those box-mix cakes with frosting from scratch. Grandma Kate taught me to make a killer chocolate buttercream when I was in grade school, and I mastered ganache before I hit my teens.

Still, my pantry closet holds a few boxes of mixes, but those are mainly for emergencies. This morning I counted eight different kinds of flours, more chocolate chips than I could probably use in a year, and baking soda in a two-pound bag, not a little box. I had to buy an extra refrigerator to hold all my fresh and frozen ingredients that I use on a regular basis. I just remembered that in the basement of my Grandma Ray's house there was not only an extra refrigerator but also a freezer and a second stove - this one with a double oven and six burners! (To be fair, it was only used a few times a year - at Thanksgiving and Christmas - but still...she would have been able to relate to the fridge/freezer out in my storage room.)

Today bread baking from scratch usually involves letting the mixer's dough hook do the kneading, but I still enjoy feeling that lump coming to life under my hands. If I am pressed for time or my hands are a little too arthritic, I may start off letting that dough hook work, but I always finish it by hand. I just don't trust a machine to do it properly. It needs to be just as Grandma Dewall taught me - kneaded until it feels right. The first time she told me that, it was frustrating. With it being my first batch of bread, how was I to know when it felt right? She told me I would just know. And I did. If you work with bread dough long enough, you'll feel that moment when the lump of flour and water under your hands suddenly transforms into a living thing as the yeast springs into action.

It was the same thing with hand spinning. I struggled through what seemed like mountains of wool batts to get the hang of it, but there was one day when it came together for me, and I felt it glide through my fingers. It just felt right, and it looked right, too. At that moment I was hooked on hand spinning. My spinning wheel hasn't been used in years, but there it sits in my living room, tempting me to put my hands to it. One of these days I will, because there are a couple of large bags of raw wool from our last flock of Icelandic sheep in the back of my storage closet.

By the time I hit junior high school and its mandatory home economics class for girls (they should have included the boys, too, but the late 60's were not so enlightened a time), I was already adept at basic cooking, baking, and sewing. Home ec bored me. I baked my first cake at the age of 7, so cooking oatmeal with imitation maple flavoring (who remembers Mapleine?) was anything but challenging. Dresses I had sewn already hung in my closet; making a place mat or an apron didn't do much for me. But my aunt worked in the Cleveland Junior High School office, so I had to behave or my parents would hear about it - immediately. Heavy sigh.

The only thing I liked about that class was that the teacher brought her pure white Siberian husky every day. That memory just flashed into my mind as I was picturing the classroom. The idea of a dog in school back then astounds me - this was long before support animals and even service dogs. But that dog was well trained; she lay under the table used as a desk for the entire class. She never moved, other than an occasional twitch of her tail. But her eyes followed everything that went on in class. Gorgeous dog. Maybe that teacher was a wild child at heart, too. Oddly enough, the last dog we owned - and still my favorite - was a husky.

Those women put themselves into me, and together in significant ways they crafted the me I became. As I sit here in my office writing this post, I have to chuckle a bit. My Grandma Kate was quite a writer, but her thoughts were penned in a beautiful, flowing script in the floral journals she kept handy. There was one in the glove box in the car to record her musings when she was on road trips with my grandpa. She had a few stashed in her knitting basket by the fireside, and there was always one in her purse. She didn't own a typewriter, and I think the idea of a computer would have astounded her. But hey, Grandma, I AM using my hands to write this, not voice recognition software, so that says something, right?

I don't throw out clothes when they lose a button or get ripped. I do what both those women did - take out my sewing machine or hand needle and thread and make repairs. Socks get darned with a light bulb stuck in the toe. (I know they make wooden implements for that, but Grandma used a light bulb, and that's how I learned.) My mother had no time for needlework of any sort, but when she realized that by age 10 I had learned to sew quite well, she quickly started filling up a mending/alterations basket for me. My parents bought me my first sewing machine for my 12th birthday, and I kept that old Singer until I was 45. (My grandmothers both owned Singers - one an ancient electric, one an old ornate gilded black treadle. I hope they will forgive me for converting to Bernina.)

There was a time in my life when I had the opportunity to pass on some of my hand skills to other women who weren't so fortunate to have had grandma times like I did. More than a few graduated from what one friend called "Katie's Pretty Good School of Cooking." Several learned the joys of knitting, crocheting, and hand spinning. And for awhile my family room was our neighborhood sewing room as young girls and their moms sat around tables learning how to sew straight seams (and rip out the ones that weren't.) Most of them never got farther than making napkins and valances (or even t-shirts for those who got brave enough to learn to work with knits). My students included both my daughters. The elder one can make a man's button down shirt that would rival Brooks Brothers. She was the one who taught me to do neck bands and collars. This one turned into her mother in many ways, but please don't tell her that! And I took on others' daughters as well. At least one young woman became an accomplished seamstress and now does impeccable alteration work. She struggled far less than I did with her first man's dress coat.

I have to smile at the memory of her first sewing project. She made a dress for herself, sitting on my lap at the sewing machine, with the foot pedal propped up on a cardboard box. That's the way I learned from Grandma Kate. I just realized something ironic. That young woman's name is also Katie. Three sewing generations of Katies.

Grandma Kate's favorite brown Rubbermaid batter bowl still sits in my cupboard, along with the bread and muffins cookbooks she gave me. I rarely use them anymore; they are there for the memories. I don't own a lot of cookbooks, because mostly I function in the kitchen the same way I learned - a handful of this, a dash of that, rarely measuring and often not even using a recipe. God forbid someone should like what I made and ask for the recipe! (My friends often laugh, remarking that I probably didn't use one. Most of the time they're right - but that's how I learned.)

And my office, with its computer and files, also holds my sewing table and my knitting stash. And right alongside the bookshelves and filing cabinets, a thread rack hangs on the wall. I have to laugh at the sight of my sewing scissors absentmindedly stuck into my pen cup.

My grandmas' hands did that, I think.