Applesauce hands

I just canned 26 quarts of applesauce. I didn't have any kind of labor-saving device. I had the old fashioned cone shaped colander, wooden pestle, and the big dark blue enamel canning pots to cook my jars in. That is how my mother did it for as long as I can remember, and that is how I did it.
Although, with the stiff shoulders from working the pestle, blisters on my hands, and chipped fingernails, I have thought long and hard about getting a Squeezo. I made one unholy mess of my stovetop, the floor and counters. But my applesauce is thick, golden, sweet, and superb in every way. I am thrilled.
I have put my total of 56 glass quart jars away, stacked in the storage room where I can casually produce a quart for friends at will. What a luxury!

When I was small, I used to snuggle into my mother during church, loop my arm through hers and hold her hand. Sometimes, leaning against her and breathing in the fragrance of Ivory soap and detergent in her dress was enough to help me get through the long sermons. However, mother's hands most often held my attention. With one finger I used to trace the veins on her hand, trying to get them to roll from side to side. After awhile she would pull her hand away from me and give me a look that said, Cut it out and listen to the sermon. So I would stop rolling her veins and start looking at her fingernails instead.
My mother grew up in the immigrant ghettos of Manhattan, back in the 30s and 40s. She and two other siblings contracted tuberculosis and had to be sent upstate to a sanitarium. There had been daily X-rays and all sorts of medications. That was why, she told me, her fingernails were ridged. So sitting in church, I looked at those vertical ridges in mother's fingernails and got lost in stories of my own making about her adventures at the sanitarium in the mountains.
By looking at her fingernails I could usually tell what fruit or vegetable was in season: grapes, tomatoes, peaches. There always seemed to be stains on her nails of whatever she had canned or cooked last. When beets were in season she wore white gloves to church to hide her glistening red-stained hands.
I tried to tell mother on more than one occasion that she shouldn't be so worried about her hands because they were beautiful: the thinness of her skin, the veins standing out that I equated with being a mature woman (something I wanted far more than breasts or starting my periods!) Mother used to say, "You've got to be kidding! My hands are just terrible!" And she would look down and self-consciously rub one hand over the other, as if to smoothe away whatever imperfections were there.
My mother never had a manicure during her entire life. She had grown up poor and then became a hard working mother of four, living a life of sewing, cooking, cleaning, and gardening. Her hands have always told this story if one looked closely.

Tonight after I finished washing up the counters, stove, and floor, I glanced ruefully at my hands. I've earned a blister on the ring finger of my right hand. My right middle finger is sore and red from cutting apples and my index finger has dark stains in a hundred tiny creases of my skin. My nails are a mess and have dark apple stains under them, and my hands are red and a bit swollen. I'll have to explain to my students that I really do have good hygiene, it's just that I've been canning applesauce. Looking down, for a fleeting moment I thought I saw something familiar. Yes, I have my grampa's crooked fingers that roll in every direction; and short, stubby fingers like my father's hands. But tonight I earned something for which I have longed my whole life. I finally have my mother's hands.