Boxing

Today I decided to try making an origami box. From numerous Internet instruction guides, I focused on two: one a box-folding video on YouTube and the other a how-to page from TinyShiny.com. Oddly, the pictorial explanation, at least for me, is much easier. After about eight tries, I got one box to work, sort of.My folding skills are a bit clumsy, to say the least. My fingers are not, as I wish them to be, long and thin and graceful.

If they were, I'd still play the piano, an instrument I gave up after eleven years of lessons, largely because I could barely reach an octave comfortably. The last composition I learned, The Rhapsody in Blue, took a year to master and memorize, and even then I had difficulty with one especially difficult run in octaves down the piano.

Mine are pedestrian hands, short, thick fingers and knuckles, serviceable but not elegant. The left bears a half-moon scar of broken glass and the right a pinkie permanently curved from a jammed finger thanks to a volleyball.

But they remind me of my mother's hands -- no-nonsense tools for her sewing and gardening. For this resemblance alone, I love my hands because they are the only physical reminders of her in me.

Now if only I could get them to crease and fold more confidently . . . .