This is my first time to write in this journal. I feel like I should continue Mama’s path, but there’s so much to write that I don’t quite know where to begin. I found this journal among Mama’s possessions, and it broke my heart to read what she’d written, but I was glad to know those things since she didn’t talk about the past. My stepfather, Everett, and my mama, Ophelia, died last month. I felt like life had given me a second chance when Mama married Everett, and we finally got to move away from Uncle Walter. That was the most miserable year of my entire life. I felt so sorry for Mama, working her fingers to the bone sewing every day, and then having to give her money to Walter. Everett was a good, kind man who loved my mother, and she had good years with him before they passed from the fever. I got the news by telegram, and Henry and I traveled to Georgia with my two young children to take care of their affairs. I wept for days because Mama had never gotten to lay eyes on her grandchildren, and Jenny, with her pale blue eyes and dark hair, looks so much like her.

Lily’s first tear fell on the page and blurred the ink on the last word. She grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and wiped her wet cheeks as she mourned for Ophelia, who had died before she met her grandchildren. Lily regretted not bringing the kids to see their grandparents more often than she did. They only lived a couple of hours away, but somehow every weekend had been filled with events. Those were excuses, not reasons, especially in the summertime, she reminded herself as she went on reading.