My Hands

My hands got old first, but I didn't notice
~I was busy~
washing dishes,
washing children,
washing the dog.

I kept tabs on everything else in a full-length mirror.
These little marks,
first red, then pink
now white
I thought of them as trophies-not age.

Yes, this spread, and
that drooped
but if I turn like this and squint
~like that~
it's not so bad.

I plucked gray hairs for a while
now I leave them in the hands of Kenneth, who hides them
and amuses me with tales of his gay lovers, like Carlos, who ran off to Quebec City last summer with Jacques. It's no big loss, Kenneth and I agree, except he took the good sheets and the new chafing dish, and why he chose the bedding and cookware is beyond both of us because he doesn't know Egyptian cotton from polyester, and wouldn't recognize a perfect crème brulée if it jumped up and bit him on the

~sorry~ Kenneth hides the gray,
And what I can't see doesn't count.

And these lines around my eyes,
if I push on the skin here
~like so~
they disappear

See?

Yet somehow, while I was
washing and squinting and plucking and
pushing
my hands got old.







I'm running out of old stuff I've found on the Wayback Machine, and soon I'll have to write something new.




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Food Post #12


I like to cook - truly I do. It's the planning that wears me down. Day after day, they want some sort of variety. Why? I would gladly make a big pot of soup for myself at the beginning of the week and eat it for supper all night long. What is this need for something different from one night to the next?


Why are the people who demand variety not the people who have to produce it?


Have I already posted this? I've said it out loud many times.