My Mother's Hands

My mother sews buttons onto clothes that nobody wears any more, just in case somebody comes back.

She has the hands of someone who has peeled a million potatoes without a single complaint, hands that know the temperature of the bread just by being held near the oven.

As a child I believed that those hands were the world, that out of them came the rain and the cure for the rain as well.

Today I watch her thread the needle against the light of the window, narrowing her eyes, and I understand that growing old is losing the thread little by little and going on sewing all the same.

I sit down beside her. I say nothing. I hold the ball of wool for her like someone holding, without knowing it yet, the last scrap of their own childhood.