Skin

My Granny’s skin was so soft, I loved to stroke

The inside of her lower arm, feel the fragile silky flesh,

Touch the softly wrinkled powdery skin

With the backs of the fingers of

my coarse rough childhood hands.

“Crepey,” she called it, and

my childhood ear heard “crappy.”

I thought she hated it, a sign of age,

Of fragility, a whisper of a certain future decay.

My own children, twenty-five years later

Stroked with the same gentle strokes

The skin of my mother’s arms,

Loving the feel of the fragile human flesh.

She loved their touch, but

Disparaged her skin, the thinness, the slackness,

The fine, fine pattern of wrinkles, like

– I now understand – the cloth called crepe.

Like my own arm, my own skin,

This genetic blessing from generations unknown.

My grandchildren may not touch my skin

In quite the same way, but their touch

On my heart is no different.