"I recently acquired, and have been reading for the first time, a diary which my mother kept from 1936 through 1940. We were living on a small farm in Vermont at that time and although I was only a child I remember many of the events she describes. It was a very different world then . . . " Thus begins "A Mother's Diary," a 40-page manuscript annotated by Robert Cooley, Kate's son. Robert—or Bob, as he is known to us—deftly weaves his own narrative into the events set down by his mother, a native Tennessean who met Sumner Cooley when he was a contractor in Florida, shortly before the housing market went bust. The years that followed were not easy, but Kate had a lot of spirit, and it comes through in this excerpt from her diary, which covers one year of her life. We are excited to be able to celebrate Mother's Day with an advance copy of this book, available here in PDF and generic ePub versions.
