801. the holding of hands

It wasn’t till we buried Grand that I noticed. I don’t even remember the day, but I was staring at his hand, his old veined paw, fingers naturally clawed. We weren’t doing anything. Only the sun sat with us on the back porch. Each of us lost in our own thoughts. Lost without the sound of plates and glasses from the kitchen. That song of union connecting the three of us. So we sat now, just Papa and I. We rocked. We watched the ocean. And I looked at his hand as if I was seeing it new, as one sees a lion in the wild or a person behind bars. From somewhere I heard a wind chime, of a breeze gently rolling sand over the nightly crab tracks, of how nothing stands still and of his hand now, alone, solitary, sedentary. His gaze was of something else, his eyes unreadable in their unblinking silence, and I wondered if he felt what I felt, had discovered what I knew now, or whether he had always known it, always known this day would come, a part of his life shared only with Grand, a world that only the two of them inhabited. A world seen by their smiles and hugs, and above all, by the holding of hands.