They say the eyes are the window to the soul, but my mama used to say that the window to the soul was the hands. The hands that would reach out to the suns rays and grasp their warmth. The hands that hold others, whether it be with reassurance or pain. The hands that caress a lovers face. The hands that hold the truth of one's age. Mama would say that to to see through a window of ones soul, all you must do is follow the waltz their hands perform.

Mama’s hands were fragile, she had held the weight of the world with those hands having raised Dada and me. Mama’s hands had grown wrinkles at only twenty three, yet her palms still felt soft when she would wipe our tears away. Mama never wore gloves, even in the toughest of snow storms. She would tell us that she wanted to feel everything before she could no longer feel anything. Mama’s hands were the strongest hands I ever knew. They survived chaos and heartbreak and yet still moved with unmatched grace when she sewed our ripped dresses back together.

Mama taught me how to watch hands. How to stare through the window of one’s soul. Mama taught me what hands to be weary of and which to hold. We would sit on a park bench across from the ice cream store, and with a cone of vanilla swirl in my hand and chocolate swirl in hers we would watch the strangers passing by. Mama would slyly gesture to their hands and we would comment on their movement, a mother gently smacking her child’s hand for throwing a stone and another picking her child up from a fall. One day as we watched the passing hands of unknown strangers mama’s face turned stern and her eyes went wide. I followed the direction of her glare and found an unsettling sight. A man of years much older than mama’s had swept his hands over the breasts of a girl not much older then myself. As the girl turned to yell at the man he fled, hiding his hands in his coat pocket.

Mama turned to me with her eyes still wide with anger and she told me, “I learned that the window to one’s soul is the hands not the eyes because no matter how hard you try to hide them the hands are always felt in action while the eyes are good at telling lies.”