The Thin Line (Between Thick and Thin)

I got my cold hands from my mother. I remember being younger and watching her do the dishes. My father would offer to do them for her. He would offer with shininess on the skin under his nose and above his lips. It looked like plastic skin to me. My mother would always say that she preferred to do them herself, even when she was tired. She enjoyed doing the dishes because her hands were always cold. The hot water was soothing to her fingers. The steaming dishes that she placed in the strainer, like her hands, would cool quickly in the air of our pantry.

But that was long ago, not that her hands are not cold now. They are. Just that dish doing and things like that don’t perplex me like they used to. I don’t sit around wondering what motivates people like my mother to do things like the dishes anymore.

My hands are still cold though. On a different body, in a different province, are these hands: the same as my mother’s.



What has been perplexing me lately is of equal insignificance though. I think about accents. I have worked and tried so hard to speak French with little to zero English residue. Unfortunately everyone always knows I am Anglophone. But what is weird is that some people will say, oh, you speak French well with very little accent. And when I meet English-speaking Francophones I sometimes say, oh, you speak English well with only a small accent. But really, what am I comparing these people to? Other Francophones? They all have thick accents; it’s just that some are thinner than others.

But how do we know that when they hear us Anglophones speaking French, we all have thin accents and some are just thicker than others? So when they say I have only a small accent, couldn’t it be true that I have in fact a bigger accent in French that they do in English but since they can only compare me to other Anglophones, also suffering from thick accents, they only hear mine as small? Even though it is big? So in relation to other Anglophones small, but in relation to others in general of all languages, who knows? Could be enormous!