Do you ever find yourself sitting across the dinner table from someone and staring at their hands?

Is it just me? I notice hands. I remember so well my high school boyfriend’s long fingers, the shape of the nail – everything. My grandmother’s hands were thick. How else to describe them? Her skin was coarse – dry from years of washing, cleaning, scrubbing with her own hands. Brutal stuff. But they were nimble, too. I kid you not, this image is real: I see her all the time pinching the dough of pierogi, quickly, adeptly with her fingers: pinch, flick, pinch, flick... My father’s fingers are stocky, but I remember admiring his nails as a kid. Many men, I used to think, had very unattractive, grimy nails. Not my dad, I noted with girlish pride.

My own hands are peasant stuff: they're small but tough. I should think a child (anyone perhaps) would feel proptected by them: I wont let go, I'll clear the bushes and bramble and make the road safer... They have burns from restaurant work, scars from an indelicate childhood followed by a period of obsessive gardening. They are darkened by the sun, and the nails could never have the shape that a manicurist would aim for. Not that they’ve ever seen a manicurist. They are fearless hands, “we’ll try anything” hands. There’s no timidity to them. They mask the inevitable weakness that lurks within. Only an obsessive hand watcher would notice, as I would notice in another, their unstillness: the paper napkin rolling, the straw paper folding, the uncertaintly in moments of repose.

It’s not that hands set a standard, that they classify people for me, that they repel or draw me to someone. But I always notice them.