In my mother’s final moments, we caressed and stroked and kissed and patted her hands and she was very comfortable basking in this attention. Perhaps we were desperately trying to return the decades of love her hands had given us. Admittedly, we wanted to soak up the beauty of the Life within Mary Ellen’s hands while we still had the chance. As I held one, I searched for words to bridge the gap created by sadness and my own wanderlust. I prayed to know what my mother might need at that moment. The answer came. “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women...” Yes. She squeezed my hand. In a now quiet room, the rays of a new morning blinded me. This was the first day in my nearly fifty years of Life, that Life did not have my mother in it. As I fiddled with a curl to style her hair as she would want it; I glanced at my own hand, now the custodian of the diamond that illuminated her mother’s hand on the day Mary Ellen was born. In that moment, a light shadow appeared. A light shadow of that same beautiful hand superimposed itself over my hand. At that moment, I knew for sure that Life has no choice but to go on. Now in my own hand, I saw generations of history and the Life of the one who had given Life to me. Yes. In that moment, I was again blessed by the touch of Mary Ellen’s hand.
Bob and tom music lyrics
“Remember these hands” were the words of her second-born to the grandchildren present for that inevitable moment when goodbye could no be longer held at bay. As the blood had just gone still and the warmth of her Spirit was slowly leaving them, I struggled to place Mary Ellen’s hands at rest in a position befitting the Life they embodied.
Brimstone rock mp3
My mother was not a woman of words, or money, or song. Mary Ellen expressed her Magic through the labor and artistry of her hands. And what exquisite hands they were; long and slender, tanned and freckled with delicately rounded finger tips; the hands of a lady whose place and time put unreasonable demands upon the hands of a lady.
You see, Mary Ellen belonged to the Greatest Generation. A child of Armells Creek, born of the true love of a politician rancher and a poet educator, she was a Montana cowgirl trained as a curious mind to thirst for world travel and dine on fine china. Mary Ellen’s young hands were the hands that carried water home, reined saddle horses, and branded cattle. These were the same hands that mastered penmanship at Trail Creek School and pressed linen for Sunday dinner.
I am music man
- When a weakened heart took her mother in her eleventh year, it was Mary Ellen’s hands that chopped and churned and pressed and scrubbed while her brothers fed and herded and branded and harvested. They kept The Ranch alive while Dad’s office took him to town and away from them. It was the Great Depression. Dad had a steady income. They never wanted for food on their table. They were grateful.