It’s selfish of me to request a haunting based on the small black-and-white photo of you in 1910, standing proudly in the ballroom with a lovely lady on your arm. Your hair is short, slicked down, and you wear a top hat and a sly smile. You look dapper, like Greta Garbo, which is why I wish you’d waft around my apartment. Grandma thinks you were someone’s cousin, maybe her mother’s or father’s, but it’s tricky to construct a story for people we meet in family photographs of great-great-aunts and uncles and fourth cousins twice removed that nobody remembers.
I want to think you’re a young woman five years off the farm, two years out of nurses’ training, who wound your way to New York City after buying a train ticket. I have a place in my heart for farm folks, a dream that you had an early education in blood and guts and shit, the birth and death of animals, and after that you could do damn near anything. You were proud of extracting yourself from the cornfields—not a bad life but not one for you, since in the photo you blossom with defiance. You’re not gloating, but seem like you’d known you were destined to be in this ballroom with a woman on your arm, and maybe that was true.
Maybe months of working in Toledo hospitals were your gateway to stories about life further east, so you told your family they needed nurses in that big East Coast urban sprawl. Maybe you said it would be a job for a little while, and you’d send money home, but the city was your life for the next forty years. You bent over beds during the flu pandemic, gave vaccinations to children, and later got polio, which felt like a summer cold, not the disease that left people in wheelchairs and iron lungs and meant FDR hid his legs from the world.
You told your family you never had time for lovers, only mentioned your nurse roommates in passing, but you visited the farm every summer to escape smog and heat. You put
on pants to help your dad and uncles mend fences and tend the animals, said it was nice to work with patients who complained a bit less. Later you sent postcards of the city to your nieces, told them of buildings that looked like they touched the sky, and said you’d send them train tickets to visit when they were older. When you came home for a week during the Great Depression, you fumed over how some men suggested the simple answer to ending unemployment was to fire women and give those jobs to men, but you knew the world would go to hell in a handbasket.
Five years after World War II, you moved back to Ohio when you were tired of soot, smog, and starting to feel arthritis in your knees. You peppered Grandma’s family photos in your later years — I recognize that wry smile, your penchant for pants, how you stand so casually with your arm around another woman at a summer picnic. Forgive me for taking the ballroom photo from its home in the album, framing it for the top of my bookshelf so I can try to smile with your grin, like I know something the rest of the world doesn’t.
You lived through women’s suffrage, first- and second-wave feminism, and maybe on the horizon you could see the right to decide when our bodies reproduced, a time when women could kiss women in public and be unashamed. That was your secret; you knew the fight would be long and ongoing, but you didn’t let others dump their fears at your feet; you just turned the bucket around. Please stand beside me when I look in the mirror and practice that expression, like whatever happens, I won’t be surprised, but know we’ll continue the fight.