Earlier this year, we jumped on the social media trend of sharing baby and childhood photos of our team, each with a unique cutline. Mine? “This is who overthinks every comma.” (Never has a truer word been uttered.) In the photo, 2-year-old me is sporting a pink gingham dress with smocking, my blonde hair is in that toddler mullet that results from uneven growth, and my baby-soft face screams exasperation. One of our contributors emailed me the following morning to tell me she’d looked at the photos several times. “Your little fingers and thoughtful expression in that frozen moment just slay me.” She went on to write, “That is the most touching thing — who knew those same fingers would be pounding the keys as they do?”

Her comment got me thinking about the hands of my own children. This month, I’ll turn 48 on the very same day my oldest child, if I can still call Sawyer a child, reaches our nation’s legal drinking age. When he was just a toddler, I’d stare at his dimpled hands in wonder as he clutched his apple juice cup, thinking about how the passage of time would mark itself on those little hands in a myriad of ways. The saddest of which, I knew, would be the emergence of bony knuckles and the disappearance of those adorable, squishy dimples. It would happen so slowly that I wouldn’t notice, until one day I’d just realize that they were gone.

When I was a child, my mom’s hands were always soft, amazingly so since she was constantly using them — crafting, sewing, gardening, DIY-ing, cooking, cleaning or serving up dishes at a local Italian restaurant. It might have been thanks to the Crabtree & Evelyn Gardeners Hand Therapy cream that was a permanent fixture by the kitchen sink of our Western Massachusetts Colonial home. She took care of her hands, her fingernails always gleaming in some shade of rose or mauve. At 70, her hands, still meticulously manicured, continue to keep her busy and can often be found holding a book.

Debbie, my mom’s younger sister who missed being her Irish twin by just a couple weeks, had bony, vascular hands. She rode her bike everywhere, swam in her pool regularly and worked in a demanding job as a nurse, thus constantly scrubbing her hands. She’d sometimes whisk me away for a weekend of shopping in Boston, or perusing charming New England storefronts, peeking into the Norman Rockwell Museum and dining at the Red Lion Inn in the Berkshires. I remember those sturdy, ropy hands gripping the steering wheel and popping Gloria Estefan’s Into the Light into the cassette player as we careened down the Massachusetts Turnpike. I hope my hands end up like Mom’s, I thought to myself. My senior year of high school, Debbie used her hands in one final act, taking her own life.

Now, my hands more strongly resemble hers than my mother’s. For starters, I don’t use hand lotion regularly — sorry, Mom! My fingers have always been long and slender, but now the veins and tendons protrude like Debbie’s did. Her hands remain frozen in time, locked away safely in my memory. They never saw age spots or arthritic knuckles. As of now, my hands already have nine years on hers. And I sure hope they still have miles to go.

Yes, these days, my hands spend hours clacking away at my laptop. But they also lift weights so that I can carry my youngest, 8-year-old Wilder, when he’s sleepy, or schlep the many decorations down from our attic each Christmas. They leash up my dogs, 10-year-old Snowball and 4-year-old Cider, so we can go for our morning walks together. They hold my phone so I can FaceTime my daughter when she’s away at college. They sink into the perfect combination of homemade sourdough starter, flour and water plus a dash of sugar so that I can make the family bagels each weekend.

Later this month, my husband, Chris, and I will likely hit a local pub with Sawyer to celebrate his milestone birthday. As our son’s slender fingers curve around a tall, cool beverage, I’ll be picturing those same hands, once tiny and dimpled, holding his juice cup tightly. And I will try not to cry about the passage of time — because time may be a thief, but it is also a gift.   OH

Cassie Bustamante is editor of O.Henry magazine.