Nov. 24 In times like these

 Nov. 24th Flash Fiction daily assignment was to start with the words "In times like these."

“In times like these,” that’s what my mother said her mother said. Mom was in a nursing home, but she had all her faculties and then some. It was her body that was failing her, and she was pissed off about it, but she hadn’t lost her sense of humor.

We were talking on Facebook, because visitations were verboten.

Lately, I was recording our conversations. I was trying to capture as much of our family history as I could. On my father’s side Aunt Lil, Aunt Evelyn and Aunt Agnes had all passed and I never had taped their memories of their move from Canada to Lowell and their work in the mills.

I wasn’t going to make the same mistake with my mom, who also held my grandmother’s history in her mind and heart.

“She went through the 1918 Spanish Flu, World War I, the depression and World War II. She would always say “In times like those we… and then she’d go on to discuss her uncle’s death from the flu, how Uncle Benny came home gassed from WWI, how her husband was 4F and how they made margarine out of something white with a red dot in the middle.”

My mom was a great storyteller and went into detail about a dress my grandmother had made for her on old Singer pedal sewing machine.

The nurse came in to take her to dinner.

“It’s times like these,” she said to me before shutting down her laptop, “that we need to make every minute we share count.”