When I was a child, each summer I would travel the two hundred miles between my house in Woodland, California, to my grandmother’s house in Fresno. Interstate 5 was still a work in progress, so for most of the years of my childhood, we traveled along what was then Route 99 to get to her home.

Route 99 was not as quick to drive as the future I-5 would be, and on those many drives to my grandmother’s house, I spent hours in the back seat of the car, looking out the window and watching the semi-trucks hauling goods north and south to every corner of California and beyond. I was always on the lookout for elusive out-of-state license plates.

Once we arrived at my grandmother’s house, I would spend much of my time there with one of my older cousins, and it seemed there was nothing that brought her as much pleasure in this world as annoying me.

Aside from grabbing my knees to tickle me, her other favorite thing to do was to tell a particularly annoying knock-knock joke.

“Knock, knock,” she would start.

“I don’t want to hear it,” I would say back.

“Knock, knock.” She would try again, and it went on like that until I relented.

“Who’s there?” I would finally say, exasperated and already knowing the answer.

“Banana.” She did this every summer as if it were a new joke.

“Banana, who?” I would say, blowing my bangs out of my face with my breath.

“Knock, knock,” she would say again, completely ignoring the “who’s there” which was both part of the “joke” and completely in keeping with her character.

It would go on like that for as long as she could get me to continue saying “who’s there” and “banana who?” but at some point, even she would tire of it and say, “Knock, knock,” to which I would reply, “Who’s there” and she would say, “Orange,” and then I would say (with equal parts annoyance and relief) “Orange who?” to which she would finally reply, “Orange you glad I didn’t say banana again?”

The truth of which was “sort of.” The larger truth was that like any joke, if you have to tell someone it’s funny, it isn’t.

But when I finished work on the nine granny squares I just had to make:

and had woven in all of the ends and trimmed them

It was time to something with them, and the something I did was to arrange them as I had the squares for the as-yet-to-be completed Crochetachella bag:

While the joining color for the Crochetachella squares had to bring together a number of disparate colors into some kind of unified whole, the joining color for this second bag, had a somewhat different goal, and I decided that the kind of summer orange I thought of when my cousin would say, “orange you glad,” would be perfect:

With my 5.5 mm hook, a crochet tension regulator ,and some trepidation, I got to work:

and soon, all of the squares were joined and the purse had taken shape:

Now instead of one unfinished crochet purse, I have two!