My great-grandmother was a rock of a woman, a 5-foot-nothing field general in false teeth and pin curlers. She set things in order and made things right and told you exactly what you were doing wrong. She was always, unceasingly, maniacally doing: the laundry, the yardwork, the dusting and, of course, the cooking.

Her name was Evelyn Baldridge, but to me, she was Grandma B. I was lucky enough to know her for almost 13 years, which meant that, when she died, I was just old enough to understand how different she was from almost every other old lady I’d ever met. For starters, she never in all her 95 years seemed particularly old. She couldn’t drive or swim. She didn’t have a husband, and although she’d had one once, I understood that was a problem she’d fixed right around the time the Great Depression hit. She lived in a house in Farmington, Mo., the size of a woodshed, where my dad’s high school portrait was the featured piece of artwork and the curtains smelled like bacon grease.