Seeking Hope in Troubled Times through the Poetics of Children's Literacies

Every school and university is closed, teachers and teacher educators are trying to support students remotely while in many cases also supporting their own children at home. There it was, this remarkable time machine, this small brown-leather bound connection to a woman who died when I was six and of whom my clearest memories are a worn housecoat, solid black shoes, and a veined hand heaping sugar and milk into my mug of coffee, making me feel like a grown up. The diary holds the seemingly mundane alongside life's volcanic eruptions-the weather; money struggles; the comings and goings of young people, to towns nearby and to war zones far away; the weather; grandchildren arriving; the weather again; and illnesses, injuries, recoveries, and death. Great-grandma's brief entries chronicle her daughter's cancer (my great aunt Katie, whom I never met) from first glimmer of concern, to months of decline, to the final day, to the longing and loneliness that followed.