Grandma’s Thread

I’m sewing together a mask out of a handkerchief and some elastic. Not surprisingly, there are people all over the world doing this same thing right now, since we’ve been told to wear them out in public. This is during the coronavirus pandemic of spring 2020. I’m using my grandma’s Clarks pure silk 50 yards, 323.1 silver colored thread, which I found in her sewing kit many years ago. We just started wearing masks on our walks in the neighborhood, but the one I quickly made out of a scarf and hairbands was uncomfortable and kept falling off.

       It’s raining, so no walk today. I’m listening to Django Reinhardt on YouTube with two comforting cats on the bed with me.

       My grandma was born in 1898, and died 32 years ago, but it occurred to me that she may have made masks with this very spool of thread at age 20 during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. The only memories of those days that she had ever talked about were fairly happy ones, so hopefully she didn’t lose anyone to that deadly outbreak. I wish I’d asked her more about what it was like to live in the early part of that century. Why didn’t I ask?

       I don’t want to think about Zoom meetings and how things were different. In 1918, rain wasn’t different, cats weren’t different, even Django was born only 12 years after grandma.

       It does occur to me to be thankful that our survival rate nowadays is much better. The world didn’t really know what a virus was, and with many immigrant families in my grandma’s Brooklyn (her parents among them), there was a general mistrust of medicine. Some people lived in tenements which had little to no running water and no electricity. Schools stayed open with the thought that poorer children would be better off away from the unhygienic conditions of their homes and under supervision where they could be better educated about the disease. Theaters stayed open too, to educate the public on how not to transmit the flu. Fortunately, temporary health centers were created, as well as mass distribution of informational posters telling how to self-quarantine. In the old photos, there are pictures of police officers, postal carriers, and of course, nurses wearing masks.

     Grandma survived. The silver thread makes me feel closer to her.

my grandma Frances

(Thanks to Untapped New York by Noah Sheidlower for info.)