The Ghost of the Willow Lane
A decades-long obsession over a lost love and a stolen romance in the quiet corners of old Seattle.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
I had just returned from Paris, where I had been for ten years in business with a maternal uncle. My father and mother having died, my boyhood friends had been scattered to all quarters of the globe. I felt a sudden impulse to revisit the scenes of my youth. I wandered toward the beautiful lane that led to the bay. There, she came, her face pale with thought—a bunch of violets in her hand. It was Viria Lorne. She had been my sweetheart in years gone by, but her mother had been opposed to our union. Now, she was a widow. I begged for forgiveness for the boyish pride that had blighted so large a portion of my own life. I told her that no other had ever usurped her place in my heart. As I reached out and took her hand, she raised her head—a look of tender love beamed from her eyes—she placed the pretty blossoms in my hand. At long last, we were never to part again.
“I begged for forgiveness for the boyish pride that had blighted so large a portion of my own life.”
This story of a long-lost love reunited in a Seattle 'willow-shaded lane' captures the romanticism of the 1880s, a time when the city was expanding rapidly from a small timber town. Today, that connection to the water remains a central, though far more urbanized, part of the Seattle psyche as we continue to debate how to preserve the beauty of our waterfront for everyone.
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