TheBanyanTree: the perfect peel

[Roger Pye]

Wonderful, Julie - I see I've still got a lot to learn, being a 
great-grandfather 'n' all!

Roger

On 26/01/2011 3:32 AM, Julie Anna Teague wrote:
> I used to be amazed at the things my grandmother could do with her
> hands. Stick them in the hottest water. Peel an apple with a regular
> knife, keeping the entire peel intact in a long green spiral thin as a
> leaf. I'd ask her, every time we made pie together, to please try and
> make it come off in one piece. How do you do that, grandma! How do you
> peel toward your thumb and not cut your thumb? How do you snap beans
> that fast without even looking or leave that tiny neat hole where the
> stem of the strawberry used to be? I was the dish dryer and she the
> dishwasher and I'd squeal at the hotness of the water that was nothing
> to her as I reached in to grab the next plate.
>
> Last night I thought about all these things as I deftly peeled an apple,
> knife slipping just barely beneath its skin, until the entire thing
> curled in the sink in a single piece. I now realize that grandma could
> do this, and I can do this, because like her, I've peeled thousands of
> apples. I've made thousands of pies, snapped more beans than I can
> remember, washed thousands of plates and pans from thousands of home
> cooked meals in water hot enough to make my sons cringe and cry out. My
> hands are starting to look like hers. My fingers are getting twisted,
> the veins on the backs of my hands pop out, and there are a few scars
> because, like grandma, I've worked decades of gardens, fixed hundreds of
> ripped seams and missing buttons, hung out endless lines of laundry on
> an endless number of sunny days, cut towards my thumb and missed a few
> times, and wrung my hands in caring over those I love. I realized, now,
> that the miracle of her hands was not the trick of making that single
> perfect peel, but in all the purposeful and joyful living that went into
> being able to tickle my amazement by doing it perfectly for me.
>
> Julie
> In honor of the everyday presence of the spirit of my loving grandmother,
> Myrtle Arla Lindsey Taylor, October 5th 1905 - February, 1993.
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