Hands

My hands, at times, are not my hands: they are my mother's hands and my father's hands and my brothers' hands. Sewing a book, I study simultaneously the page and the thread and my hands, freckled, aging, winter-crackled, scarred, the tiny triangular striations of what Annie Dillard called the topopgraphy of her then much-younger mother, the family fingers -- sturdy and short -- and the hint of an age spot surfacing, and I wonder, How have I grown so old?