My grandmother’s home was the core of her being in the years that I knew her, and so I decided that it should form the central panel of this year’s state fair project.

Situated in the south west quadrant of a large plot of land, her home and her yard were immaculate.

The three remaining quadrants of the lot were kept plowed, and across the northern most edge of the property ran a railroad track that served as the demarcation of exactly how far north I was allowed to go on my own.

While I was growing up, the tracks were used to transport freight, and I would, whenever the opportunity presented itself, stand at the window of the room where I stayed when I came to visit and count the cars as they passed by.

It could be that things in grandmother’s house got out of order on occasion, but I never once saw anything out of place in her house unless I was the one responsible for putting it where it did not belong.

Everything, it seemed, was done before she started to do it, so there was never any dust, laundry was always clean, and there was only an occasional dirty dish.

My grandmother lead an adventurous life, but unlike modern women, her adventures had, for the most part, not been of her choosing.

Widowed three times and with five grown children (a sixth had died in childhood), by the time I was born, my grandmother had settled into her own, keeping a well-ordered and welcoming home, and she was, for the first time in her life, the mistress of her own domain.

It has been a challenge for me to recreate that domain in crochet, but over the weekend, I continued making more squares, and after working out several options with graph paper and colored pencils, the center panel has finally begun to take shape.

Here is how far I had gotten as it neared sunset:

There is a lot of work to be done between now and October 13, and I still don’t have a clear sense of how the finished project will look, but the only way for me to move forward, is to move forward.