The Plague Year: What Nana Taught Me

Last updated on: March 13, 2020 at 10:01 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Plague Year: What Nana Taught Me 2020-03-13T22:01:36-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Nana lived through the plague year that swept West Virginia after Word War I. She never said all of what she saw to me in one sitting, but I pieced it together over time. She went to so many funerals of children her age. Nana had many, all too many, stories that came down to influenza.

Read a little history, and I read a bit, and it all came together: Nana lived in a plague year.

Nana was born to sorrow. Her story is sorrowful, but I cannot yet tell it all: madness, judgment, pain. This is not my tale to tell. She had enough pain from birth to justify failure, bitterness, defeat. She was crippled in her knee in an era that had no nicer term than crippled.

Yet this is the same Nana who would sit with me on the sun-porch and pretend to be Mrs. Cucumber (long decades before Veggie Tales) having conversations with me, Mr. Tomato. We had such larks, the stories she told.

A great many were sweet, but sad. She married, faced the Depression, raised my luminous aunts and uncles including prophetic Mom, survived World War II, kept calm and carried on. What of the hard times?

She had food for whoever asked. Once a woman came to the door asking for anything for her family They were starving. Nana, always ready to help, replied that she was making beans and the woman was welcome to share.

“Beans?” the woman scoffed, “Don’t you have eggs?”

Nana was bemused.

Mostly, however, my poet, song writer, homemaker, Nana endured. She saw the year of influenza carry off most of her class and when I hinted at this (with my book learning!) she said something like this: “The times were hard. I wouldn’t do that again, but people turned to God and things were better.”

I have never forgotten this: external failure need not be equivalent to internal failure. Nana had hard times, but those hard times made her a saint.

This is the simple truth of this plague year. Mayhap things will be mild or history harsh, all we control is our reaction. We can stand on the deck of a sinking culture and whine, bemoan, panic, rush the lifeboats, or we can keep calm, see hard reality as it is, and do our duty.

We carry on, because we can and should. Some might say we must, but Nana had been let down by enough people that she knew what we should do is not the same as what we do. I am now in another plague year being asked by many what we should do.

Nana and her generation mourned, but not as those without hope. She could recall a wake as a party, a funeral as a new beginning, and death as new life. She saw, in a vision, the Heavenly City come lowering down. They turned from the ephemeral to the eternal, credentials to wisdom. They chose God.

May this be said of all of us in this our own plague year. May we do our duty as God gives us to see our duty, keeping calm, and carrying on.

I miss you, Mrs. Cucumber! See you in the Morning.

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March 14, 2020 Strong, Kind: Nana Beat the Plague Year

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