The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary precision and extraordinary passion, may have taken less time had she not needed to supplement her paltry elementary schoolteacher income by tilling potato fields and pruning plum trees in rural Bulgaria. Born in the final years of the sovereign monarchy Bulgaria briefly enjoyed after five centuries of Ottoman occupation, she had worked on her embroidery in the middle of the Communist dictatorship that had begun when she was five and would last until I was five.…