A Time To Speak

About the Book

A Time to Speak is a simple narrative of the everyday life of a nineteenth-century daughter and sister, wife and mother, artist and businesswoman. It is a uniquely American story about family, neighbors, and community; of their work ethic, self-sufficiency, and integrity. Stella Brush reveals her sense of humor and indomitable spirit through earthquake, flood, and fire; through the First World War, the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, and the Great Depression. Her keen observations of the beauty of nature and the eccentricities of the human condition ends abruptly on the eve of the Second World War, though she lived on for another sixty-two years.

About the Author

Estella Mosier Brush was born in 1892 in an adobe house in southern Arizona. The third of eleven children, she accompanied her peripatetic parents from Arizona to Oregon to Northern California and back to Arizona. In 1905, the family finally settled in the Great Central Valley of California, where she met her husband and married in 1912. She raised five children, and though she lived what seemed an ordinary life, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it appears extraordinary.