The Portmanteau

This very short story (seven and a half minutes in its current form) was inspired by some historical research I began in 2020, after reading a memoir written by my grandfather’s grandmother (my great-great grandmother) - Mary Louisa Bolton Cummins. Born in 1860 near London, Mrs. Colin Cummins emigrated to Canada in 1883. She and her family lived near the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan and eventually settled in Nelson. Her memoir offers a wealth of information about her childhood in England and the challenges she and her husband encountered trying to farm in Saskatchewan. Curiously, however, the story comes to an abrupt halt in 1918, two years after Mary Louisa moved from the Kootenays to Victoria, after the death of her oldest son and her husband. Mary Louisa lived another twenty years and died in 1939, after completing her memoir the previous year. Her son, my great-uncle Tom Pullen, speculated that Granny Cummins had kept a diary but chose to destroy it when she finished her memoir. Uncle Tom took it upon himself to edit the manuscript, transcribed from her beautiful sloping handwriting, then distributed it among Granny Cummins’ many descendants.

So what happened in 1918?
The Spanish Flu.