Leigh Kimmel says:

When I was young, I always looked forward to visits to my grandmother’s house. It was big and old and at the end of a long lane, and it was full of interesting stuff in the way our suburban tract house wasn’t. I loved the built-in bookcases in the front room, complete with the fold-out writing desk that contained all kinds of hidden compartments. There was a full basement below, full of antique appliances that no longer worked but Grandma never threw away. Upstairs were four little bedrooms, and over them an attic that wasn’t exactly finished, but had floorboards over the joists so we could walk among the treasures stored away there.

Grandma was the one who encouraged my interest in writing. She would make sure I had a quiet and well-lit place to write when I visited, and she never mocked my efforts as “little stories” or treated writing as something that got in the way of more productive uses for my time. She even encouraged me to write letters to the editor of our local newspaper, and provided the envelope and stamp to send them. By the time I was in high school, I’d even had some published, and had been invited to write an article or two on subjects of interest to young people.

Now Grandma’s gone, and the old house will probably have to be sold once we clean it out. As Dad and my brothers haul the old wringer washer and Monitor-Top refrigerator out of the basement to be sold for scrap, I recall how they’d inspired my book on the history of household appliances. How many hours of research had I put into it, how many visits to not only public and academic libraries, but also to archives to examine documents of now long-vanished manufacturers?

And then I discover the bundle of papers in the back of Grandma’s bedroom closet, behind the dress coat and suits of a grandfather I barely remember, who passed on from this world a few months before I started school. The pages are old and crackle under my fingers, having been stored in less than ideal conditions, but they had been carefully tied with a scarlet ribbon.

I’m not sure what I’d expected. Perhaps youthful love letters? I knew Grandpa had been a veteran, given there’d been some speculation in the family that exposure to chemicals during his tour of duty led to his early demise. I could completely imagine him and Grandma writing back and forth during his deployment.

But as I untie the ribbon, hands trembling with excitement, I discover that they are nothing so prosaic. Although they are written in my grandmother’s firm, clear hand, not a one of them is addressed to anyone. Nor are they the sorts of notes one might make to oneself, dealing with things needing to be accomplished or recording matters taken care of.

Instead I am astonished to discover one after another poem or brief tale. Some of them are realistic — an appreciation of the old courthouse down at the county seat, or the story of a young man facing a difficult decision. Others are more fanciful, tales of an imaginary world co-existing in parallel with the real one and occasionally intertwining. To judge by the paper, they were most likely written when she was in her late teens or early twenties. Although they are both beautiful and compelling, I find no evidence that she ever tried to have them published. Did she simply not know how to go about it, or was she discouraged in such a way that she buried these pages and set aside such dreams forever?

I know one thing — I have a task ahead of me, to see to it that my grandmother’s writing finally sees print and finds an audience. And in the new world of Internet publishing, even an independently published book can reach a wide audience, and doesn’t have that ugly blot of “vanity publishing” to mar its reputation.