Today is my great-grandmother’s birthday. She passed away in 2012, but she would have been 104.

As a child, I would stay at her house when I visited Texas to see her and my other extended family. She taught me to embroider, to bake, and to make her very creamy, very strong eggnog, telling me to taste test it so many times that I got tipsy (then she giggled madly). She lit up when she had a child around to spoil and when she was pulling your leg. As I got older, she always wanted to...