Hands

Story grandma tells when she's drunk

The waxing crescent that night; it was toasty enough to take a clandestine lake swim, and we’d race through the forest like backyard and glide into the lake with a screech and splash. My painfully graceless, lanky eight year old body could only take about fifteen minutes of excitement before I’d join grandma creating water outlines of our backsides on the creaky dock.

 

Her hand would wander along my back and the other would point to the sky and she’d whisper:

           

“How many stars do you think there are up there? Let’s try to count!”

 

But I was eight! No, no I was eight and a HALF. Sarcastically I would retort:

           

“Grandma you can’t count the stars; they’re polka dots of light and the sky is infiniti long and we’d be here for seventy four years!”

 

And the comforting leather of her small hand would brush towards my face and sweep a wet string of auburn back into the rest of my disastrous post-lake-swim hair.

 

To eight year old me it was simply a fact,

But sappy little Grandma Susan insists, that’s when she knew how special I was.

Because I never needed to count the stars in order to love them.

 

Right, sure. I’m special.

Maybe I’ll understand when I’m arthritis and melanoma ridden.