When I was a young university student, I often spent weekends at a farm some 40 kilometers north of Helsinki. That was where my grandparents lived, sharing a yard with my uncle, my mother’s brother who was a half-time farmer at the time.

I had made that same trek on weekends as a child, when my parents and I would drive up to see Grandma and Grandpa. The town was a 40-minute drive from Helsinki. Close to the action, but completely in the countryside. Claim to fame: a mental hospital.

Back then, I’d mostly hang out with my cousins, throw darts, play soccer, and run around, play with and in the old cars that my uncle always seemed to have around, stashed away in the barn.

And then, without me even really noticing it, a family feud separated me from Grandma and Grandpa for a few years.

When I drove up to my grandparents during my university years, I would mostly hang out with my cousins, sleeping over at their house, listening to music, playing sports, driving around in my car, listening to music, but no weekend ended without me paying a visit to the big house on the other side of the yard, saying hello to Grandma and Grandpa.

Grandpa was often sitting by the kitchen table, looking out the window. Sometimes he’d be reading a paper, but most often he would just be sitting there, watching me and my cousins on the yard, the cars driving in and out, or just keeping toll of all the people walking on the quiet country road while rubbing his hands, trying to make them warm. Due to a circle saw accident decades ago, he only had three fingers in one hand.

If I didn’t see him sitting in the kitchen, I knew he’d be sitting in front of the TV, watching sports, so I’d stand in the doorway for a while, before pulling up a chair and watching ski jumping with him for a second. And then it was time to go say hi and bye to Grandma.

She’d be in the basement, listening to the radio, sitting at her weaving loom, pounding away, making another rug. Grandma had a clothes store of her own in the 1970s and 1980s, and the rest of the family is still walking on what was left of her inventory, on all those dozens of rugs she would always make, and give away.

Back in the 1980s, I thought she looked like Miss Ellie, the great matron of Southfork in “Dallas”, the TV show. Not only that, but like the Ewing family’s true leader, she was a strong-willed, entrepreneurial woman who scored small victories in her life, all through her life. She learned to swim in her fifties, and to drive a car in her sixties. And oh, how she loved to swim, and dance and sing. And maybe drive, too, although she never talked about that. And neither did I, after I saw her once pull in to the farm, and hit our dog.

Maybe she was born tough, maybe she became tough living on that farm, having four children, seeing their house go up in flames so that the family had to live in a sauna while a new house was built. She was also resourceful, coming up with her own fixes, and she never wasted anything. No food, no piece of clothing was thrown away. Ever.

For some reason, she also liked to remind people of the shortness of a life. When, as a kid, I fell in love with a small purse she had, she gave it to me as “an advance on her will.” I didn’t want it anymore, but by then, she insisted on it, so I had to take it.

So when I showed up in the basement, wearing a pair of bleached, torn jeans, she wouldn’t have any of it. She decided to sew a little patch on them.

“Don’t worry, it’ll be fine, nobody’s going to notice,” she said.

She pulled a pair of old jeans from her shelf, made a patch, and got to work. We’d talk a little, about school, and nothing in particular. She asked if I remembered how I had sat by her cash box at the store, telling people that I was guarding her money. I said I did, because that was our thing, and then she handed me my jeans back. And they were actually pretty cool.

Weeks, months later, another hole appeared. She fixed it, like she fixed the third, fourth, and fifth hole and with the same straightforward, no-nonsense care she once tried to patch my heart. That time, I was sitting in Grandpa’s TV chair, crying, with Grandma putting the kettle on behind me, trying to help me see everybody’s points of view, in my little love drama.

By the time I graduated from the university, she had practically remade my favorite pair of jeans completely. Somewhere along the way, I had got into the fixing business as well, creating new designs, like an “R”-shaped patch, and one that looked like an arrow. And where there weren’t different colored patches, Grandma had somehow stitched the threads of denim together.

I had been living in Sweden for a few years when I heard that she had hurt herself, but didn’t really understand that she was about to die.

It was the second time I had lost her, and this time she wasn’t coming back. When I got the news, I just sat on the couch and cried a little, thinking that the purse was now completely mine. And that she wouldn’t mend my jeans anymore.

I put the jeans she had been working on in a closet and left them there. Truthfully, I couldn’t quite fit in them anyway. The sides were stripped wide open, so they looked more like chaps than jeans, but they had survived a few moves, and I wasn’t going to throw them away.

Besides, I was hoping that maybe one day I’d be able to wear them again.

“Every time I hear this song, I think of mother’s funeral because an old neighbor suddenly started to sing it there,” Mom said last week, when Daughter was singing a Christmas carol in the backseat.

A little weird, for sure. Not that Daughter was singing it, it was the day before Christmas Eve after all, but Grandma’s funeral was in April.

Last fall, when she was visiting us here, Mom saw my jeans in the closet. She learned to swim in her twenties, and she took her driver’s license in her forties – much earlier than Grandma, but you can see the same determination there. For her, there are no problems, only solutions that haven’t been found yet.

On Christmas Eve morning, there was a present for each of us under the tree. Mine was soft, and inside, there were the light blue, bleached, torn jeans with a huge R shaped patch over the right knee.

And they fit.