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.