Over the weekend, WordPress offers up a Daily Prompt urging photographers to post pictures of hands. I remember one I took a few years ago of my father’s hands wrapping wire near the tailgate of his work truck.

It’s the weekend and I’m lazy, so I only imagine posting the photo, never actually doing it. In the meantime, we visit Mary’s garden and she gifts me three big dahlia’s, wet with May rain.

This morning, I’m still thinking about my dad’s hands. The ones that are weathered from the sun, and always bearing some nick or scratch. They look tough but their skin is thin.

There’s something about the juxtaposition of hearty hands wrapping sharp wire and delicate blooms dripping with rain water. I want to put these images together. So different, yet, somehow connected.

I know Mary’s got working hands, callouses and dirt under the nails. But those hands cultivated these bursts of color blooming with petals, silky soft.

My father’s hands tighten barbed wire on splintered fence posts in 105 degree sun. But they also hold pen to paper, scrawling poetry of snow melt over granite and lush green pastures.

Here’s to what we have a hand in.