My hands, my grandmother's hands

My hands have become my grandmother's hands with veins and brown spots. 

There is a test for age by pinching the skin on the back of the hand. A young person's skin will disappear so fast that if anyone blinked, they would not have seen it. With advancing age it returns to normal more slowly. 

Mine now takes three seconds.

Still my hands function well. They skip across a keyboard making no more or less typos than they did decades before.

Most of the time I've used them they've served me well, from preparing school work, drawing, turning book pages, doing chores.

They can do all that they use to do and still perform well to prepare a meal, caress my husband, offer a tissue to a person crying, give a back pat to say well done.

I don't often think of my hands, except when I glance down and see the veins, the brown spots like my grandmother's. I'm not sure that the rest of me will ever be as wise or as loving as she was, but like her, I think I've earned each sign of my aging.