I have spent the past two days crocheting square after square in an attempt to bring one particular corner of my grandmother’s kitchen to life and share with my readers the utility and joy of my grandmother’s stove.

For my grandmother, a stove was an all-purpose appliance. Not only did she use it to prepare meals, it also served as a hair dryer, clothes dryer, and most memorable to me, shoelace dryer.

My grandmother believed that nothing in this world could not be improved by a good cleaning, and the laces on my shoes were no exception.

Each summer, after I had been at her house for a few days, I would eventually find myself consigned to wearing whatever sandals I had brought as I would wake to find my shoelaces removed from my shoes, properly scrubbed, and set out to dry on the broiler side of the oven.

My shoelaces would not again grace my shoes until such time as my grandmother deemed them “clean.”

Once the offending laces had had all of the valley dirt scrubbed from them and were sufficiently dry, I would be back in my sneakers and ready to play a full tilt.

As for my grandmother’s stove, here is my attempt to render it in crochet:

I am eighteen squares shy of finishing this corner panel (there will be two more nine-square “columns” of granny squares on the rightmost side), and my hope is that I finish them well before the weekend starts so that when I wake on Saturday morning, I can begin to tame the chaos of this project by joining the squares.