Hands

When I was sketching a lot, I used to draw hands. My grammas both had wonderful hands. My foreign grammas were long and wiry. The other had small fleshy hands. My one grandfather had huge hands and large fingers. He was a teamster. They said he would bet that no man had a team of horses that could pull a singletree from his hands when he would brace himself with a set post, put the singletree in his hands and not jerk the leads but pull steady. My oldest cousin said he saw him do it. He was an old man when he also threw a burning cookstove out of a kitchen. He was in his 70's. He lived with an aunt. He was on of Indiana's last living SpanishAmerican War vets. Wow, did i write a lot. This in response to a poem about hands as told by an old man. He was a gambler and loved to bet. So when the roadgraders had to quit working when it rained, they would gather in barns to stay dry. He would bet that no team could pull the tree out of his hands. He would brace himself agains a barn post, hands on either side with his stomach against the beam, they would hook up the team and bring the singletree to his hands and then have the team pull. My granddad was about 6ft 6 and 350 some pounds and must have been some hunk of man. Red-headed Irishman. He was a card player too. I'll tell you some more stories later. A single tree is a tapered wooden bar with 2 clevis hooks on the ends. The hooks go onto the tugs that was on the harness. Pulling teams had collars and, I think the strapping was called hames. I am a city girl too but loved the farm and my grandpa. He was a wealth of interesting education with a gradeschool education and a college mentality.