The Wall of Hands
by
Lois Francis
Summertime meant Grandma's house in Souris. Two glorious, sun-filled months of freedom and discovery in that treasured place, full of strange delights and unexpected treats like the stained-glass rose window at the front entrance, and chokecherry jelly.
It was a huge three-storey brick house of many bedrooms, quite ample for five siblings and their mother to visit in comfort, and also for their father to come down at weekends. Grandma and her bachelor son, Uncle Alf, lived there alone, except for visits from family members throughout the year.
There was a white-pillared porch wrapping two sides of the house, and that is where my sister and I used to sit on cane rocking chairs, waiting for the delivery boy from the meat market. His name was Murray and he had taken a shine to my older sister, Joan. He rode a bicycle with a wide steel basket on the front for the daily delivery of packages. I think he arranged that Grandma's house would be the last call on his route so he could stop and share a glass of lemonade and spend time visiting with Joan. I was just the 'gooseberry' as my mother used to say, meaning a miniature chaperon.
The attic of that house was a special place comprising three huge hot, dry rooms, completely finished with plaster walls and wooden floors, but totally empty except for a few old boxes and trunks of stored treasures. They must have been designed as servants' quarters, since they had their own staircase in the back area of the house, but my grandmother refused to allow strangers to 'live in' and made do with daily help.
In any case the third storey remained unused. The smallest of the three rooms housed a cistern, and it became a summer ritual for us five siblings to dip one hand into the cistern then place it on the plaster wall, as high as we could reach, to etch a brownish handprint on the wall. We each had our own row, to measure our yearly growth in height and hand size.
In the early years, my eldest brother, perpetrator of the ritual, lifted us smaller ones, including my baby brother, to the lip of the cistern, so we could submerge our hands and be directed to our position on the wall, to depict our row of progress through the years.
It was a thing of beauty, that wall: brown stains of palms and outstretched fingers in ascending order. Each palm, each finger, like some primitive work of art, affirmed the history of lazy summers of contentment and innocent joy.
I don't know if my grandmother ever saw the 'wall of hands' in her attic. I know we told my mother about it at a family reunion long years after Grandma was gone, and she was shocked.
The house was later turned into suites for a multiple family dwelling, and I sometimes wonder what the renovators might have thought when they came across that wall of hands in the upper room.