This is probably the biggest treasure my family has.
It doesn't look like much of a treasure on the outside, does it?
Well, you have to open it to find the treasure.
My grandmother, Emma Taylor Hopkins, wrote about her life on the pages of this spiral notebook. She only wrote 54 pages but they are full of snippets about her life. She covered her childhood and school years, her marriage and the births of her children and grandchildren. She wrote about places she lived, trips she took, every day life and her family, including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. There is an occasional list mixed in with the stories and if you read what follows you can see that when she took a break from writing she left herself some reminders of what she wanted to cover next.
I don't think anyone knows exactly when Mamaw (as all of her 8 grandchildren called her) started writing her story or when she wrote the last passage. She died suddenly on January 19, 1978 of a heart attack. I've often wondered if, whenever she wrote the last paragraph, she knew it would be the last thing she would write. She listed her grandchildren by name then added these last words "I wonder if they can imagine how much I love them."
Yes, Mamaw, I think we all knew.
