Hi, thanks for taking my call. I've been going back and forth on whether to share this for months now, but I think it's finally time. My grandmother passed away in February of this year. Ninety-one years old. She'd been living in the same house outside Bakersfield since 1952, this little ranch house on about three acres, nothing fancy, but it was hers. And that's the thing about my grandmother, she never threw anything away. Not a letter, not a photograph, not a single piece of paper if she thought it might matter someday. Receipts from 1960. Birthday cards from people who'd been dead for thirty years. All of it, just packed away in closets and drawers and boxes. So when she died, someone had to go through all of it. That someone was me. I'd just been laid off from my job at the phone company, they were doing cutbacks, half my department got let go, so I had the time. My sister said she'd help, said she'd drive down from Sacramento, but she never showed up. Story of her life. So I drove out there alone. Spent the whole week by myself in that house, sorting through seventy years of my grandmother's things.
The attic was the worst of it. Three generations of stuff crammed under that roof. Old furniture covered in sheets. Boxes of clothes that smelled like mothballs and dust. Christmas decorations nobody had touched since the Kennedy administration, still in their original packaging. Stacks of magazines, Life and Look and Saturday Evening Post, going back to before I was born. I was up there for two full days just making piles. Keep, donate, throw away. Mostly throw away. The second afternoon, I found this wooden chest pushed way back under the eaves. Had to crawl on my hands and knees to reach it, and I scraped my elbow pretty good on a nail sticking out of a rafter. Heavy thing, the chest. Oak, I think, with these brass hinges that had gone green with age. I'd never seen it before in my life. Never knew it existed. And I'd spent summers in that house as a kid, played up in that attic when it rained. But this chest, it was like it had been hidden. Inside was mostly papers. Letters from people I didn't recognize, names I'd never heard my grandmother mention. Old receipts, a marriage certificate from 1946, some kind of land deed. And at the very bottom, wrapped in a piece of blue cloth, was a photo album. Small one, leather-bound, the kind that holds maybe thirty pictures.
Most of the photos were what you'd expect. My grandmother as a girl, maybe eight or nine, standing in front of a farmhouse. Her parents on their wedding day. Horses, fields, a barn that looked like it was about to fall over. I was flipping through, not really paying close attention, thinking about how I was going to get all this stuff down those narrow attic stairs. Then I got to the last page. It was a Polaroid. One of those instant pictures with the thick white border. prints with thick borders are distinctive - Uma' On the back, in my grandmother's handwriting, it said 'Summer 1943, Miller's Farm.' The photo showed her standing in a wheat field. Golden wheat, taller than her waist, stretching out behind her to the horizon. She was young in the picture, maybe twenty-five, wearing a cotton dress with little blue flowers on it. Her hair was pinned up the way women did back then, kind of rolled at the sides. She was smiling. Not a posed smile, a real one, like someone had just told a joke. And standing on either side of her were two figures. They weren't human. I don't know how else to say it. They were small, maybe four feet tall, with gray skin and those big dark eyes you see in magazines and TV specials. The grays. Two of them, standing in a wheat field in 1943, with my grandmother between them like they were old friends posing for a Sunday photograph.
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