A Simple Prayer

by Elizabeth D. Sands Wise

I was driving alone in the
dark, both hands on the wheel. A car turned onto my road and passed
me, its headlights flashing into my windshield. That’s when I saw
it.

I took my left hand off the
wheel and held it out in front of me, palm side down. It looked
normal, distinctly like my hand, my plain gold wedding band
reflecting the city’s pseudo-darkness. Then I drove under a street
lamp and-as the silver gray light grew brighter and then faded back
to darkness-it was my mother’s.

As a ten-year-old, waiting
for my nail polish to dry, I would sit and compare my hands with
hers. Mine were always smoother and often browner-my features are
still more golden to her copper tones. (Exposed to forty years of
washing dishes, housework, planting, and much playing, her ruddy,
freckled hands were wrinkled a bit more than mine, and brown and
orange age spots were racing the freckles up her sun-stained
forearms.) My fingernails have always grown stronger and faster than
hers, too-the powder inside the latex nurse’s gloves she wore
every day made her nails brittle and weak. As we waited, I would sit
with her and try on her weddings rings, holding my left hand out to
appreciate their grown-up-ness, taking them off, putting them on,
taking them off, one by one: the marquis-cut diamond (she told me
this cut elongated her stubby fingers), her diamond-and-emerald
companion ring, her simple gold band.

When peace
like a river

My grandfather died of a
sudden heart attack a few days before my fourth birthday, so we moved
in with my grandma. She was fifty-four, strong and independent, lived
on a farm, taught adult Sunday school, hosted banquets in her big
farm house, collected bells, and won a local election. And she
watched me on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I didn’t have
kindergarten.

I picture her in two
places-behind her quilting frame, hunched over it, one hand above
with the needle, the other hand below, hiding the finger I knew to be
capped with a silver thimble; and in the kitchen.

The blue-and-white
Lone-Star-patterned quilt on the queen-sized bed in our guest room
has a tag sewn on the underside of one corner: "Quilted especially
for you by Clara Elizabeth Howe." She is my namesake, and I learned
to sew from her boxes and boxes of quilt scraps-often sewing my
misshapen little pillows directly onto my favorite turquoise corduroy
pants by mistake. (I learned to remove a seam from her, too.)

Farm stands bursting with
sweet corn in the summer time still remind me of my grandma’s corn
pancakes, pan-fried and topped with maple syrup. Sure, she made
tomato soup and grilled cheese, chicken corn soup, shoofly pie, ham
loaf and meatloaf, and other central-Pennylvania-grandmotherly foods,
but I most miss the pancakes. Nobody in my family remembers eating
them but me.

Compared to hers, my kitchen
is like a hospital. I’m always disinfecting the countertops,
scrubbing my hands with soap when eggs or raw meat have been out-and
sometimes when they haven’t. But long before salmonella was a
household term, my mom would let me lick the batter off of her index
finger while making dozens of Christmas cookies and holiday treats in
Grandma’s big farmhouse kitchen. Mom would scrape the bowl neatly
with her white spatula and then use her finger to get the last few
drops. If I was underfoot in the kitchen, as I invariably was, my
pudgy little self knowing a treat was coming, she would let me lick
her finger. Oatmeal ‘skotchies were my favorite.

Sometimes I make cookies
just to eat the batter.

attendeth my
way

My friend Katy was born on
July 3, 1925, fifty-seven years to the day before I was born. Katy
lives alone, and I went to her house for tea and cookies, a final
‘goodbye’ before I was to move across the country. While I was
basking in her hospitality, enjoying the perfect pot of tea, Katy’s
pink depression glassware, and the top-secret-recipe cookies she
always serves, Katy hunted for a poem I had written for her a few
months ago. She couldn’t find it. Then she hunted for a hymn that
was stuck in her head-I hunted with her through a half-dozen
ancient, dusty hymnals-and couldn’t find it. Just before I left,
Katy hunted for her cookie recipe, the top-secret one. She hunted and
hunted. Once she found her unorganized recipe collection, cuttings
from magazines, hand-written scribble on notecards and other scraps,
all jumbled together in a three-ring binder, she hunted some more.
She found it eventually and passed the secret on to me.

For about an hour, we sat
outside on a swing her father had built for her fortieth birthday in
1965. I was playing with my camera settings, getting ready to use the
timer to capture the two of us together, when she reached out toward
the camera. "Just a sec," I said, "it’s almost ready."

"Sugar,"-she always
called me "Sugar"-"I just wanted to hold your hand."

when sorrows

A quilt hangs in Grandma’s
quilting frame, unfinished, and probably will until my mom breaks the
ice and asks for it. Grandma now lives in a small shared bedroom at a
care facility, and the nurses don’t often succeed in getting her to
eat her pureed vegetables. I wouldn’t eat them either.

My mom and I drove the three
hours to visit her at Christmas. On the way, Mom told me not to worry
about her getting old, that she does crossword puzzles and eats
brainfood-brazil nuts and the like. She measures out her almond
portions in the palm of her hand. She exercises her body and she
exercises her brain. She doesn’t want me to worry like she worries
about Grandma.

I hadn’t seen my
grandmother in a year, and I was prepared for the worst. She would
look old, I knew. She wouldn’t remember me. She wouldn’t say much
or respond to questions. My mom said she liked to hold children’s
books, to feel the textures, to keep her hands busy. And she liked to
hold hands.

And so I sat beside her,
holding her hand, as my mom gave her a pedicure. (At first she didn’t
like that my hands were cold.) I told her my favorite stories from my
childhood, about the banquets she used to host, how she taught me to
set the table correctly and to sew from her boxes of scraps. We
talked about my naturally curly hair and strong fingernails being
inherited from her, which she didn’t believe. I told her about how
she took me to "Sewing Circle" every Tuesday in her church
basement, where I would crawl around on the floor, tying the other
old ladies’ chairs to the table legs with thread. She didn’t
remember me, or my stories, but she thought I was funny and liked my
(eventually) warm hand in hers.

She rubbed her thumb up and
down mine, feeling each imperfection in the skin. She explored my
whole hand, finger by finger, touching each of my hard fingernails,
lightly flipping the end of each one with her fingertip. It was a
feeling from my childhood I’d forgotten until that moment: my mom
did this same thing when she held my hand in church through the long
sermons.

like sea
billows roll

It’s too late to ask
Grandma for the corn-pancake recipe-or even to verify my memory
that such a food existed. It’s too late and yet, fittingly, only
now am I aware of all the things I want to ask her.

Since the days of sitting in
Grandma’s kitchen, slurping up tomato soup, or painting my
fingernails with my mom, my knuckles have gotten a little bulkier and
the skin on my hands is glossier now, softer and beginning to loosen.
The freckles I only had on my round cheeks as a four-year-old have
spread onto my shoulders, down my arms, and are slowly decorating my
hands’ smooth skin. The light green veins on the back of my
dominant hand-I’m right-handed though both Mom and Grandma are
left-are raised, bulging slightly through the golden, softly
spotted skin, especially as I hold this pen and scrawl across the
page.

whatever my
lot

My hands do things my
grandmother’s never did: type 100+ words per minute, wear a silver
thumb ring, lace up a pair of running shoes to go for a jog, hold me
steady while I try to perfect the downward-facing-dog yoga pose. But
they also do things she did all the time: turn well-worn pages of the
Mennonite Central Committee’s More-With-Less cookbook, whip
up a shoofly pie, hang wet laundry on a clothes line because the sun
dries it faster than a machine can, plant and harvest my own
vegetables, sew a button on my husband’s black wool coat that fell
off months ago.

I keep a picture of Grandma
tucked into the thin pages of my Bible, in the Psalms. Next to
"Grandma Howe" on my prayer list, I have written, "When peace
like a river…" I see that and I sing for her, in honor of her, on
her behalf. Most mornings, I sit and sing, my cold hands slowly
warming around a hot mug.

thou hast
taught me to say

Sitting across from Katy on
her swing, I held her warm silky hand in mine for a few minutes. It
was so small, fragile, old. She commented four different times during
my visit that "it’s so hard getting old." Her hand in mind-I
took a picture of our hands, the precious moments we sat there-made
me think of my grandmother, a dozen states away.

I can picture my mom holding
Grandma’s hand, comforting her anxiety, speaking softly and kindly,
her rings catching the light.

I can look down at my own
hand, holding my left hand out as I did at age ten, but now seeing my
own wedding rings, the marquis-cut diamond, the simple gold band.

It is well

My grandmother prayed.
Sitting before her pureed lunch (she doesn’t like to swallow), my
mom said, "Mom, do you want to pray?" and she said "yes." She
said yes.

We each took one of her
hands and bowed our heads. We waited for a few seconds. We glanced up
and made eye contact, and then we waited a few more seconds. "Go
ahead," my mom said softly.

And then she prayed. Not
just a short "bless this food" sort of prayer, but a long,
multiple sentence, bless this food and thank you for your
faithfulness and the way you bless us every day and for this and for
that and for my loved ones and the prayer lasted a good thirty
seconds.

It was a simple prayer, and
yet it caught me off guard, as if she were reminding me: It is
well with my soul.