Donna VanderGriend

Another moment drops into my momentum bucket.  Time’s liquid is inching toward the three-score-and-ten mark.  Even as the pail fills, I am evaporating.  My significance pales; I am in diminishment mode. But I have not yet disappeared. So why not play?

First grade grandson Josiah asks again to play the Memory Game at the kitchen table.  Having far more intact and uncluttered memory bytes than I, he always wins.  My hand hovers hesitatingly over a card choice, hoping to find a match. 

“Look at your hands, Grandma…that’s gross!” he says.  I see what he sees.  It’s my veins, I conclude.  The backside of my hand looks like the topography of several small mountain ranges marked out by blob-trails of murky grey-green finger paint.

A Spirit-thought comes to me out of the hovering.  “But, Josiah…watch this.”  I put my elbow on the table and my hand in the air with the backside visible to him.  As my fingers fold into a relaxed looseness, the blood obeys gravity, slides down my arm, and leaves my hand smooth as the Great Plains.

“Wow!” exclaims my grandson.  “I want to do that.”  He drops an elbow on the table, situates his own hand at eye level, and stares.  Gravity is of no use on his already smooth, un-mottled skin.

“Do it again, Grandma,” he requests, sure he is missing part of the procedure.  He pays undivided attention to the blood-draining and tries again to repeat the miracle of veins at work.  Nothing.


Josiah looks at my aging hands resting in quiet victory next to the unturned game pieces on the table, the mountain map protrusions and wrinkled valleys obvious once again.  I watch his wide eyes display discovery:  his grandmother’s hands are no longer gross; they are full of ancient mystery.   I feel my evaporating self expand through the eyes of my grandchild.



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