In storytelling, creating the sense of touch in order to reach a reader or listener's heart is never easy. We say we are "touched" by a story or an encounter but to feel the physical sense of touching takes work. The other senses: seeing the freckles on a face or hearing a voice as graveled as coffee grounds or experiencing the smell of leather on a character's hands or tasting salt on the tongue, those are all easier -- at least in my world - to create in a reader's mind. The sense of touch, well, that's the challenge for me.

Maybe it's because touch is so powerful. It can express domination or proprietary relationships. A protagonist's arm draped across a woman's narrow shoulder or a fist against a nose speak volumes. The power of touch to heal is revealed in the skin to skin of premature infants who when held naked against a mom or dad's bare chest gain weight faster than baby's swaddled but lovingly touched. Love scenes (without gynecological descriptors) are all the more impassioned by the beauty of words around the nature of touch. Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet wrote "See how she leans her cheek upon her hand/O, that I were a glove upon that hand/That I might touch that cheek." Could there be a more lovely image?

There are ethnic issues, too, in incorporating this sense. I remember being careful on the reservation not to touch a child's head learning that some tribes feel to do so by someone other than a family member is a violation of the child's spirit. Touch speaks of tenderness, as though through softened eyes. (Brain research shows that when a woman holds a baby in her arms, not even her infant, that the amount of oxytocin in her brain, increased dramatically. It's the same hormone that makes us feel that we're falling in love. It could account for those softened eyes when a woman touches a baby's skin.) But I digress.

For some of us, touch is like a violation of a personal space. People who have an abused history have an invisible circle around them that others often violate without knowing. Certain cultures are more comfortable with bodies touching on subways or at the market.

While in Africa, our interpreter told us that American space is different from African space, all related to touch. Our guide hired two cars for our American space needs. We were fine with all of us in one vehicle. We wanted to hear each other as we touched shoulders, even smelled each others' breaths. We finally convinced our guide that we could live with African space. We sent the luggage into the American Space of the second car.

In Rigali, Rwanda last February, before we flew into Burundi, we attended a graduation ceremony for a women's collective being taught leadership skills and offering micro-loan support. At 7,000 feet above sea level, in this Lakes Country of East Africa, with temperatures of 90 degrees, I felt pretty hot. We were asked to be onstage beneath a large tent because our traveling companion, Kelly Bean, headed an organization (African Road) that helped finance this important educational work. Standing as her words and others were interpreted, I could feel the sweat in my scalp seeping. It pooled beneath my hat then slid down my temple like a raindrop against a window pane. Through the down of my cheeks it eased, ready to drop off the back of my jaw.

Before I could wipe my cheek, I felt the tender touch of an African woman standing next to me. A stranger. She reached across a cultural divide and with the back of her knuckle followed the line of perspiration wiping the length of my face with her finger.

I turned to her. Our eyes met. We said not a word. But I know her in a way I know no one else because she touched me. I will remember her always.

If I work hard and do it well, the pleasure of created touch will bring satisfaction to a reader and they will remember perhaps more than the sounds and sights and smells wafting through a story. "Touch has a memory" wrote Keats. That's what I'm looking for in my stories - and in my life.