Chapter 17
“I’m going to be an aanaga,” smiled Asiavik.
In the Iñupiat language of Northwestern Alaska, aanaga means grandma.
The dimples grew deep on her weathered cheeks.
She finished the last stitch in the blanket she was making for the baby who was coming.
She held the blanket in her hands.
They were tough hands.
When she was a girl, she butchered, skinned and cooked the seals, caribou and whales the hunters brought into the village center for the people to share and eat.
She picked up eggs from the rocky, frozen Arctic earth.
The handle of the knife she used for this work grew worn and smooth over the years.
Her hands grew strong and calloused.
“Ah,” she thought as she looked at the knife’s handle and her hands, “It’s the Iñupiat way.
One thing affects another.”
Her hands grew tender, too.
She planted, nurtured and shared the astonishing, beautiful gerum flowers that grew on the Point Hope ground.
The oil from those flowers made her strong, calloused hands supple and tender.
Her hands were best for holding a newborn baby.
“Sting, calloused and supple, tender - you hold opposites together in ways that make parts wholes,” she thought.
“That’s also the Iñupiat way.”
She could hardly wait to wrap the blanket around the new baby, to hold the baby in her hands.
- “Fragments of Hilcias’ Notebook,” by Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl creations, 2020
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