My Ninety-Six-Year-Old Mother Has Got a Grip

The physical therapist takes my mother’s hands.

“Squeeze,” she says, and then actually flinches under my mother’s grip.

My mom hides a smile. She loves surprising doctors and therapists with the strength of her hands.

“I’ve got milking hands,” she tells them.

Starting at age seven, she was in the barn each morning and evening, sitting on a stool beside a cow, her head against its flank, and her hands emptying its udder by squeezing milk into a bucket.

At the average of maybe 500 squirts per cow and with 5 cows per milking, she topped 5000 squirts per day, making more than a million compresses per year of her childhood hand milking.

The therapist is lucky.  My mom’s grip could have been stronger. When she was fourteen, her barn time changed. Milking machines came to the farm.

“Want me to tell you a story?” my mom likes to ask after a grip assessment.

The therapist says yes. They all do. It’s what you say to a ninety-six-year-old.

And so my mom tells about the time she was on a committee to buy carpet for a church sanctuary.

At a flooring store, the committee found exactly what they wanted—the right style, the right color, the right quality. Only the price wasn’t right. And so the committee stood in the showroom wavering.

“Tell you what,” the salesclerk said, as he loosened a strand of fabric from the carpet sampling. “One of you break this strand with your hands, and I’ll give you a discount, a big one.”

He handed the strand to the committee chair. And one to the next guy in line. And the next. None of them could break the strand. My mom was the only one left. But the salesclerk didn’t offer a strand to her.

“Let me try,” my mom said.

She took a strand in into her two hands, snapped it in two, and the price became right.

“Milking hands,” she says now to the therapist. “That’s what did it.”

At ninety-six, my mom’s good grip means she can still open jars and chop vegetables and carry pails of water for her plants. But even more, her grip strength is an indicator of health. Studies show that people with weak grips tend to have higher risks of developing heart disease and stroke and metabolic disorders.

All my life, my mom’s hands have been stronger than mine. She still loosens jar lids I can’t budge.

But then, my hands have been on computer keys far more than on the underside of a cow.