Mama always smelled like cinnamon. She kept a tin of cinnamon drops in her apron pocket and handed them out like they were medicine for every kind of problem. Scraped knee? Cinnamon drop. Bad dream? Cinnamon drop.
In the fall of 1918, she started giving them out more than usual. Folks were getting sick all over town. We’d heard rumors months earlier about some strange illness when a letter from Mrs. O’Rourke’s son at an army base arrived saying something was moving through the barracks, laying strong men low in a day. By summer, though, the talk had faded, and folks thought it was gone. Mama didn’t.
She remembered the influenza that came through when she was a girl in the 1890s, the yellow quarantine cards nailed to front doors and the eerie stillness of the town’s few streets. She said sickness didn’t just vanish.
When the first local fell ill, old Mr. Dalton from the feed store, people began to say, “The trouble’s here.” The town paper called it “Spanish influenza.” Mama shook her head. “It’s not Spanish. Spain’s neutral, that’s all. They print the truth because they can. The others…” She leaned in, lowering her voice. “The others are fighting a war and can’t afford bad news. Morale slips, and people start wondering if we can win.”
Soon, the mill workers began wearing handkerchiefs over their faces. Church closed for the first time I could remember. The schoolhouse shut its doors as well. “No gathering means no spreading,” Mama explained when I asked why we couldn’t see my friends.
She kept the windows open, even when the air turned cold, saying “we have to, helps keep the air fresh.” She scrubbed the doorknobs with vinegar until the house smelled like a pickle jar left open too long. And every night, she’d boil water on the stove and drop in eucalyptus leaves, letting the steam curl through the kitchen.
Papa was already gone by then, off in France with the Army. In one of his letters, he wrote, We are losing as many men to the sickness as to the war. Mama read that part in a whisper, and folded the paper before I could ask more.
When the trouble finally reached our street, it came in fast. Mrs. Ellis was burning with fever by midday; by dusk, Mama was at her bedside, sleeves rolled, cloth in hand. I watched from our window as her figure moved back and forth in the lamplight. The baby’s wails carried through the night, but by morning, the fever had broken. Mrs. Ellis still lay pale as linen, but she was breathing easier.
After that, people started knocking on our door at all hours — neighbors, strangers, the minister with a bundle of blankets under his arm. Mama always let them in. Not into the house, though — she set up the old backhouse with a cot and a stove, kept a kettle going there night and day. She’d press a cinnamon drop into their hand and say,“We’ll see you right again.”
One night, I woke to find her sitting at the kitchen table, head resting on her arms. Her apron was crumpled in her lap, and the cinnamon tin sat open beside her.
“Mama?” I whispered. She looked up with a faint smile. “Just tired, honey. Just tired.”
By Christmas, the trouble had taken a dozen from our street. I overheard Mama telling the minister that hundreds of thousands were gone across the country. In some towns, she said, they’d posted guards at the borders to keep strangers out. In ours, it was the neighbors who kept watch, carrying soup across frozen yards, tending fevers in rooms that smelled of camphor and boiled sheets, singing low to restless children.
The sickness left our little house standing, with Mama still at the stove, stirring soup for whoever needed it. She never talked much about that autumn after it passed. But I remember her hands, raw from washing, warm when they held my face, and the way the whole house smelled of eucalyptus, cinnamon, and stale pickles even in spring.
Years later, when I was grown and Mama was gone, I found the old tin in her sewing box. Still a few drops rattling inside. I didn’t eat them. I just kept them in my pocket for a while, like she used to, in case someone needed something sweet to get them through the day.
Please note: this is a historical fiction snapshot. While based on real events, the story, characters, and incidents are fictitious.
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