As I’ve mentioned before, when I was a tiny child, my Great Grandmother Emma Mae (we called her Gramma Mae) made me and my sisters and cousins each a granny square afghan. I’ve carried mine around the country for almost 40 years, but never quite knew what to do with it.

It was a small thing — 48” X 64” — and not particularly pretty to look at. But it means the world to me.

Her choice of square color and placement can only be described as “random”. She’d put 4 greens in a row and one of them would be a different shade, etc. She chose yellow for her “holding” color — and used several shades to complete the blanket. To top it all off, she used an abundance of thick, red thread to sew everything together.

After decades of staring at the only relic remaining from my connection with my Gramma Mae, I finally got brave and took the whole thing apart on New Year’s Day. Then I got braver and actually fixed some of the squares that were especially wonky. I made one more green square from the edging yarn to replace a blue square that was beyond repair.

To my complete amazement, our gauge is identical. And when I ripped a couple of the squares that needed some love, I discovered that — like me — she turns her rounds. It was a sweet connection and as I ripped out stitches and recrocheted the pieces, I could feel her hands on the yarn, too.

I then spent a couple of days arranging the squares until I got a layout that I liked. Once I knew where the squares belonged, I created a pattern with my word processing software and printed it out.

Once all that was done, I started edging each square in black Red Heart — the traditional holding color and the only brand of yarn I ever knew her to use — with two rows on each square and attaching as I went. Once they were all a single piece, I created a border of black with one row of yellow and a very simple chained scallop edge.

The afghan is now large enough to completely cover the top of a king size bed, or the back of a large sofa. It’s useful and somewhat prettier and I’m just delighted with it.

I’m even more delighted at the time I got to spend with my Grandma Mae. She’s been gone a long time, but it felt like she was kind of hanging around here over the past two weeks, encouraging me to be brave and rip apart her work, matching me stitch for stitch as I reassembled it, and whispering stories about rare, cool nights in Texas as I sit wrapped in this now-warm afghan in a somewhat colder Tennessee.