decades and puzzle pieces

Today my grandma turned 85, and she requested that her whole family come to church with her for the occasion. One moment in church, I had a revelation; Mary Kay, one of the church ladies, handed gram a potted plant, which she reached out shaking hands to accept. I remember not that long ago, one day when I went over for a visit, gram said her hands used to be like mine. As she spent forever reaching out those hands to grasp the plant, I wondered if she was remembering the smoother, stronger hands she once had. It's one of those thoughts that hangs around the subconscious and is never fully realized until it is understood so completely that to explain it seems so stupid, because it's just an obvious fact, more obvious than the sky's blueness. In that moment, I connected the old woman I've known all my life to the stories she always tells about times before my memory. I could never fully comprehend that gram was my age once, even with the pictures to prove it. Of course, without my knowing it, she has always been carrying around the memory of her 20 year-old self, and it has been a burden on her old fingers to remember that they were once young.

Hey Dan, did you catch that I wrongly used the word "subconscious?"