This blog article is recycled from one of the first blog articles I wrote for The Borrowed Book. I hope our readers don't mind a re-run of sorts. We had family come into town that I hadn't seen in years, and my writing time got eaten up with hours of yakking.We shared so many memories, and some of them are family mysteries we will never solve because the people involved are long gone.
But that reminded me of this family mystery that I was able to solve a year and a half ago--The Mystery of the Death of Mabel.
Approximately
twenty years ago, my grandmother and I were going through a box of old photos.
I came upon one picture of a baby (see photo), and my Grandmother said, “That
was Mabel. She was born two years before me and died when she was eight months
old.”
“How did she
die?” I asked.
My
grandmother shrugged and said, “Something called phantom.”
I questioned
her further, but she remembered nothing else. No clues to find out what this
disease or illness was. I assumed the word phantom
was her interpretation of something she’d heard as a child. Kids often hear
words wrong.
My
grandmother died a few years after that discussion. With her passing, I lost the
only person who remembered little Mabel. I entered her into my family tree,
then wrote down the few facts I knew on the back of the cardboard picture and
tucked it into my genealogy notebook.
Forward
about ten years. . .
I got a
computer and internet access, and tried to research the disease. I used the
spellings “phantom,” “fantum,” and “fantom,” but found nothing in the online
lists of old diseases available at that time. Eventually I stopped looking, and
Mabel’s memory and her picture were once again relegated to my genealogy
notebook.
Forward to
the present. . .
My husband
and I were watching Marshall Dillon
(the show that preceded Gunsmoke) on
the Western Channel, as we do every evening lately—him on the couch, and me in
the chair with my computer in my lap. During this broadcast, Doc Adams
diagnosed a cowboy with “brain fever.”
What exactly was brain fever? I
wondered. I’d heard of it before, but didn’t know the details. So, I Googled it.
One thing led to another, as often happens with internet exploration, and I found one site
that contained a long list of old-timey diseases and the modern disease
equivalents.
Out of
curiosity, I glanced down the list. That’s when I discovered what probably
happened to Mabel.
Cholera Infantum. In all likelihood, as a youngster, my grandmother heard
about Mabel’s death, and her child’s mind remembered only the last portion of
the disease. . .fantum. Now I have a likely cause of death to put in my photo
album with Mabel’s picture.
Cholera
infantum isn’t related to cholera at all, but the symptoms are similar. It was
a ruthless, brutal summertime killer of babies. I’m not sure where the word infantum comes from. Maybe from the
Latin word infantia, which means
infancy?
I feel fortunate to have stumbled upon the answer to Mabel's death. I can imagine my grandmother's reaction if she were still alive. She'd perch on the edge of her chair, eyes, sparkling, and listen to me.
I hate to say this, but writer’s block might just be another way of saying “undisciplined.” It’s hard to write when the words aren’t flowing. I’ve been to that store and shopped in their gift store. Those days feel like walking through heavy, wet snow, at least 12” inches deep in the blowing, frigid wind, with a wind chill factor of 0 degrees. Getting the picture?
The process of writing a marketable product doesn’t come magically but only with experience. The more you write and participate in classes on writing--absorbing the subject as a whole--the more honed your storytelling will become. You begin to understand the connection between backstory and characterization, as well as the power of defining goal, motivation and conflict before you start. Does this do away with seat-of-the-pants writing? No, absolutely not, but it is much easier to stay within the parameters of your story when you have built the framework for the character’s journey ahead of time.
Moore enjoys life in the historically rich Cumberland Valley where traffic jams are a thing of the past and there are only two stoplights in the whole town. 
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