By: Christopher Johnson

To Ulee Newman, his grandmother’s Victorian house was a place of comfort and safety and marvels and magic, all in one. Grandmother Hanson, her name was—his father’s mother, and she lived about a mile from his house—or, rather, his parents’ house—in Cleveland Heights, just outside Cleveland, a town of obsequious and stately trees and broad, friendly, well-kept lawns and streets that curved elegantly in semi-circles.

Ulee would bike his way to Grandmother Hanson’s after the travails and small tragedies of school, and she would greet him with a cookieish hug. She was only five feet two inches tall, and even though he was only in seventh grade, he was already several inches taller than she, and she would reach up to give him a kiss and ask him how his days at Millard Fillmore Junior High had been, and she would serve him chocolate milk and oven-warm brownies, and the brownies had walnuts in them, and he munched the brownies with great glee and thought that baked goods were the most marvelous things in the entire world.

Ulee was happy to be at Grandmother Hanson’s grand Victorian house rather than at home, where his three younger siblings—one brother and two sisters–would be running around like banshees, and his mother would be worn-out and screaming at them, and the younger children would leave a mess in the kitchen, and the whole scene would make Ulee want to escape.

It was never like that at Grandmother Hanson’s. Grandmother Hanson was quiet and orderly and precise. She had just turned seventy years old–had been born way back in the previous century—the long-ago nineteenth century. 1890, to be exact. When Benjamin Harrison had been President of these United States. She had a round-as-a plate face, and wrinkles crisscrossed the skin of her face like tiny vessels of memory. She had compressed lips and crystal blue eyes that reminded Ulee of a cloudless day in June.

Grandmother Hanson wore toughness like an indestructible apron, and this indomitable quality blazed in her eyes. She had been a nurse during World War I. She had not gone overseas but rather had worked in hospitals in America, tending to the wounded soldiers who had returned home with shot-up legs and arms and, in some tragic cases, had led to amputation. When Grandmother Hanson had told Ulee about these injuries, tears had crept into her eyes like little cat’s feet.

Grandmother Hanson’s attire was Victorian-era: loose-fitting polka-dotted dresses that descended to the middle of her ankles and revealed precious little of her body. “I know I’m old-fashioned,” she would sigh. “But you know what, Ulee? As Rhett Butler said, I frankly don’t give a damn.” This occasional jarring use of mild profanity told Ulee that there was more to Grandmother Hanson than met the eye.

It was about this time in Ulee’s progression through life—seventh grade—that nature took its coure and Ulee began to think about girls—all kinds of girls—dreamy girls, practical girls, girl with braces, quiet girls, talkative girls, studious girls, free-spirited girls, tall girls, short girls, nervous girls, quiet girls. But . . . but. . . the girls were living in a different country from the one that he inhabited. When Patsy or Susie brushed accidentally against his sleeve, he froze. The ability to talk or even think abandoned him completely. When Patsy or Susie came within inches of him, he was pulverized.

Grandmother Hanson knew about this trouble of his by instinct. She knew how his shyness afflicted him like a disease. One day the two of them were sitting in the kitchen engulfing brownies, and Grandmother Hanson stared into Ulee’s blue and innocent eyes, and she asked, “Ulee, my young lad, are there any girls, or rather young women, whom you like at school?”

Ulee looked down at his brownie as if wanted to sink into it. Should he tell Grandmother Hanson the truth? He had to. There was no hiding even the most uncomfortable of truths from Grandmother Hanson. He paused. He opened his mouth. Speaking through his embarrassment, he murmured, “Yes, I . . .I like Amy Melder.”

“What do you like about her?”

What did he like about her? “Well,” he said, “I don’t really know. I’d rather not say, if you don’t mind.”

“Why not?”

“Uh, . . . I just don’t know like to talk about these things.”

She knew instantly what emotions were tearing at and confusing Ulee. She remembered that she had felt those emotions herself when she had been young so long ago. Ulee looked down into his lap, hoping that his grandmother would move on to some other topic. But she was undeterred. “Ulee,” she said, mildly and gently and with endless respect for his adolescence, “I get it. You don’t want to talk about it. I was there, too. Many, many eons ago, it seems like. I was young once, you know. I remember what it was like.”

            His grandmother’s words went straight to his heart. He felt single, alone, isolated, yearning. His grandmother knew it instinctively. She said, “Ulee, you don’t have to tell me any more about it than you want to. I totally understand.” She looked at him. “But . . but if you don’t mind my saying so, I think that if there is someone that you like, I would offer only one tiny piece of advice to you, which I can offer you out of my time on this beautiful earth.”

            Ulee stared at his brownie.

She continued, “My humble advice is that if you feel yourself wanting to talk to Amy Melder, and if you find that it’s a little hard to start, which is natural because everyone feels a little bit shy, which is completely and absolutely normal, well, when you approach the young lady, it might help you if you try to picture me and pretend you’re talking to me, your old Grandmother Hanson–that you picture me and pretend that you’re talking to your old, wrinkled, hard-of-hearing, hard-of-seeing stooped-over grandmother. Call it psychology. It just might help you to get started.”

            Ulee looked at his grandmother, and he instantly felt the wisdom of her words, and then, out of nowhere, he started to laugh. He laughed, and Grandmother Hanson began to laugh, too, and the kitchen filled to bursting with the manic sounds of their laughter, which bounced off the walls and echoed around the kitchen, which smiled in response. Ulee felt levitated by the grand and simple advice that his grandmother had given him.

            They turned to eating their lunch, and Ulee asked his grandmother whether he could explore her attic. She nodded her head and said, “Certainly.” He finished lunch and climbed the stairs of the grand Victorian house to the second floor, and then, on the second floor, pulled the rope of the ladder that led up into the attic. The ladder descended, and he climbed it, using both hands to steady himself, and slowly entered the attic, which was as black as the far reaches of the universe. He stepped onto the floor of the attic and reached for the light switch and found it and turned it on. Light instantly attacked the far corners of the attic.

            He looked around. Grandmother Hanson’s attic always cast a spell on him, and it did so now. It was a place of magic and escape. It contained the memories and remains of Grandmother Hanson’s entire life, and the life of his own father, who had spent his childhood in this antediluvian Victorian house. Ulee felt the presence of memory in the attic like something palpable. He walked up to a rocking horse, which had been his father’s during his own childhood. The toy horse was now encrusted with dust, and he brushed away the dust and climbed onto the rocking horse and started to rock back and forth, feeling his entire body move atop the wooden horse, feeling as if he were riding a memory of his father doing the same thing when he had been young, and as he rocked, he felt the wind in his face, as if he were riding a real horse along a trail that rambled through the Old West.

            As he rocked, Ulee’s heart beat like a hare’s feet. He slowed down the rocking horse and climbed off and saw his father’s old baseball mitt, and he put the mitt on his left hand and pounded it with his right hand and imagined that he was playing baseball with his father back in the 1930s, when his father had been a boy. He pretended that he was playing right field for the Cleveland Indians and was circling under a high fly ball hit to right field and was chasing after the ball and making a miraculous catch to save the game for the Indians and help them beat the detested Yankees.

            He saw his father’s BB gun and picked it up and held it to his right shoulder and aimed and pretended that he was shooting at a bear in the wilds of northern Michigan, where his family often went camping. As he did so, the years magically receded, and he felt himself entering the boyhood life of his father. The feeling sent a shiver down Ulee’s back, like a charge of electricity. He felt the presence of his father, and he now knew something about his father’s boyhood that he had not known before. Yes, he felt the presence of his father—the man who put on a suit every morning and went to work and came home at night and had a drink with his mother and silently read the newspaper for the entire evening. Now, as Ulee played with his father’s toys, he felt as if he had recaptured a piece of his father and that his father, as a boy, was standing there with him, fully present, in that attic of memory.

            He found Grandmother Hanson’s old photograph album. It was also encased in dust. He blew the dust from the cover and cracked it open, and it creaked as he opened it as if it were reluctant to divulge its secrets of the past. He turned page after page. Many of the photographs had been taken in the early days of photography, in the years following the American Civil War. Ulee was fascinated as he paged through the album and felt the presence of his ancestors. The women wore heavy black gowns and hats encased with the feathers of pheasants and other birds. The men wore dark suits and thick neckwear that reminded Ulee of the photographs of Abraham Lincoln. Without exception the men and women alike exuded an indomitable quality.

            Most of these ancestors, he knew, had been farmers, first in Massachusetts and then in Ohio, where they had migrated—drawn by the rich soils of the Old Northwest. From the looks on their faces, Ulee imagined that they had had difficult lives. Yes, these were his ancestors, and he was their progeny, carrying their blood in his veins. As he studied the photographs, he felt that he had a better sense of who he was and how he fit into his family’s history.

            He continued flipping through the pages of the album until he came to a page with the photographs of two men, side by side. One man he recognized as his Grandfather Hanson—his father’s father. Ulee had barely known him. Grandfather Hanson—Lucas Hanson–stared out from the page, with dark hair parted in the middle and a mustache that bent down like a curved iron pipe. Grandfather Hanson’s look was severe. Ulee remembered that his grandfather had died in 1953 of a heart attack, when Ulee had been only seven years old. He vaguely remembered Grandfather Hanson as somber and formidable, an engineer who was able to fix almost anything in their house. Ulee remembered the coffin that had contained the remains of his grandfather, and he recalled looking into the coffin and staring and staring at the corpse of his grandfather and being frightened, as if his grandfather would suddenly open his eyes and rise from the coffin like a vampire.

            The other photograph was taped on the page of the album to the left of his grandfather’s photograph. Ulee did not recognize this man. He was younger than his grandfather, and he had lighter skin and thin lips and was wearing a uniform, and Ulee recognized it as the uniform of American soldiers who had fought in World War I. This man was more handsome than his grandfather. To the left of his thin lips was a small dimple. In the photograph, the man’s eyes stared from the past in a way that was clear and direct. His lips wore the shade of a smile. Ulee wanted to know who this man was. He felt the need to know as an urgency that pulled at him like an almost-remembered dream.

            He closed the photograph album and grasped it in his left hand, and with his right hand, he turned off the switch to the bare overhead light in the attic, and he descended the ladder and pushed the ladder up so that the spring caught hold of it and returned the ladder to its storage space along the ceiling of the hallway.

            He descended the stairs to the first floor to find Grandmother Hanson, and still he grasped the photograph album tightly. Still carrying the album, he walked into the living room, where Grandmother Hanson was now sitting on the sofa, half-asleep. He sat down beside her. Her eyes were at half-mast, and she was breathing heavily. “Grandmother,” he said, “I have a question for you.” He scrunched up next to her, and her eyes blinked awake as he jostled her. She was surprised that Ulee was holding the old photograph album. “Oh, that old thing,” she said. “What did you want with that?”

            “Well, I just found it really interesting to look through, seeing all my old relatives and how they dressed and everything in the long-ago days. It was interesting to look at the pictures, all brown and worn and everything. Some of the pictures date back almost to the Civil War. That’s amazing!”

            Slowly she succumbed to his enthusiasm and said, “I haven’t looked through these photographs in a long, long time. Maybe I need a fresh eye like yours. You know, Ulee, as you get older, you maybe get a little jaded and cynical.”

            He paused and then said, “Well, there’s one photograph that I’d like to know about.” He flipped to the page in question—the one with the photographs of his grandfather and the other man—the one who was a stranger to him. He pointed to the photograph of his grandfather and said, “I know that this is Grandfather Hanson. I barely remember him, actually. But I do remember a little about him.” He paused. “But who is this other man next to him?”

            Grandmother Hanson stared at the photograph of the other man, the stranger who stared out at them from years long past, the man to the left of her once-husband, now gone. As she looked at that photograph, Ulee felt something change in her. She stiffened. She seemed not to know what to say. She was suddenly lost in the past, as if it were a dark and suffocating pool. Finally, she turned toward Ulee until she faced him directly, and she started to speak. Her voice was calm. She said, “Ulee, he was a boy I knew. A young man, I should say. I knew him before I knew your grandfather. It was so long ago, but this photograph makes it seem like yesterday. It was so very long ago. We were lovers. I don’t mind saying that, even though I don’t suppose I ought to. I was eighteen years old. I was in love with him. Our love was a spirit hovering over us and binding us together. There was no space between us. It was the time of the Great War—1917—the year when the United States entered the war. He went to Europe. I received letters from him.”

Grandmother hanson stopped talking. She had disappeared down the halls of memory—the sadness of memory. She closed the eyes and raised her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose and squeezed it and then shook her head ever so slightly. Ulee looked at her and felt something that made his heart thump in his chest. Grandmother Hanson continued, “Then the letters stopped. I never received another letter. I contacted the Army, and it took a long time to get an answer, and somehow then, I never really received a definite answer. Somehow, some way, the young man had disappeared in Europe. The Army told us that he was missing in action and that they did not know what had happened to him. It made me very angry that it took so long to get an answer from the Army, and even then, the answer was so damn inconclusive. It was as if the Army had somehow lost a soldier.” Ulee looked at his grandmother. Her eyes were beclouded.

            His grandmother stared straight ahead and breathed steadily. She was a strong woman—he had always known that. She said, “I have such memories. Little memories. We would write notes on tiny bits of paper, and we would pass them to each other. There was a pond where we would swim. We would go swimming together and then lie on the sand next to each other and let the sun dry us off little by little. Then, after the sun had dried us off, we would go to my home and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and eat them. We would walk in the woods, and our hands would be barely touching, and we would not say a word to each other. But we knew things, even without talking.”

            Grandmother Hanson’s skin was as pale as a corpse’s, and her eyes slipped into the past, which grasped her like a vise and squeezed her tiny body. Ulee felt that he should say something to her, but he did not know what to say. Grandmother Hanson sat next to him, and he could tell that she had continued to melt into the past. “What about Grandfather Hanson?” Ulee finally asked.

            “Well,” she sighed. “I met your grandfather after the war was over. I think it was 1922 or 1923. It was the Twenties, the Jazz Age, which you’ve probably read about in school. We met at a dance. I was just coming out of my grief over the young man who had gone to war. It was a crazy, exciting time. I loved to dance, though my parents disapproved very much. I threw myself into dancing. I was trying to forget the young man. Your grandfather and I met at a dance. He was solid and industrious and serious. He was ambitious. I realized this very soon. I liked very much that he was solid and serious and ambitious. We married, and I gave birth to your father in 1925. The war, and all the sadness that came with it, became a distant memory, buried like a dead child.”

            She paused. “But you know what, Ulee? The past is never gone. I was to learn that the past shapes you in ways that do not even realize. The memory of the young man, of the soldier who went off to war, was like a shadow. I confess something. The young man who had gone to war shadowed our marriage. Somehow, strangely, I sometimes felt the young man’s hand lightly on my shoulder at night. I grew, over time, to love your grandfather. I loved two men—the memory of one and the reality of the other. Your grandfather was a good man. He was a good provider. I loved him. But I never stopped loving the young man who went away—who went missing in Europe. I loved a memory, and I loved a physical person.”

            Ulee looked at his grandmother. He was alarmed. The memories seemed to have shriveled her. “Are you all right, Grandmother?” he asked.

            She looked at him and smiled. “I’m more than all right. Ulee, it is good sometimes to feel the things of the past again. It’s what makes us human. But what about you, Ulee? How do you feel about what I’ve been telling you?”

            All that she had told him—all the secrets—all the truths—had nearly overwhelmed him. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “It all . . . it all kind of makes me sad. I just never knew or suspected. There’s so much more to your life than I knew.” He put his hand on her bony, skeletal wrist. It was an instinct that he suddenly had, and he obeyed the instinct. “I feel bad about the young man who went to war.”

            She looked at her grandson. “There is one thing I thought of, Ulee,” she said. “When you were talking about the young lady whom you like. What is her name again?”

            “Amy Melder.” He paused. “What is it, Grandmother?”

            “Well, when I was talking, I thought of something that I wanted to say to you. It’s as if my memories taught me what I wanted to tell you.”

            Ulee listened. She said, “It’s just this—that love is always possible. It is floating in the air, in the wind, waiting to be captured. Like molecules in the air. It is there, waiting. But it is up to you to have the courage to take it, to grab it, to hold it. Love is there, waiting.” Ulee stared at her in confusion at first and then looked far away, beyond his grandmother. He then looked back at his grandmother, and he grasped her shriveled hand.

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Christopher Johnson is a writer based in the Chicago area. He’s done a lot of different things in his life, from merchant seaman, high school English teacher, corporate communications writer, and textbook editor to educational consultant and freelance writer. He’s published short stories, articles, and essays in The Progressive, Snowy Egret, Earth Island Journal, Chicago Wilderness, American Forests, and other journals and magazines. In 2006, the University of New Hampshire Press published his first book, This Grand and Magnificent Place: The Wilderness Heritage of the White Mountains. His second book, which he co-authored with a prominent New Hampshire forester named David Govatski, was Forests for the People: The Story of America’s Eastern National Forests, published by Island Press in 2013.