Mattie Hill Shields was born in rural North Carolina in 1909 and never got beyond an 8th grade education, yet she was meticulous about furthering her education in other ways. Her lifelong dreams were to see the world and become a writer, but she abandoned these in order to care for her ailing mother and younger brothers and sisters. She ended up raising three generations of her family's children, never looking back at her own lost dreams. When she had time, she often sat and worked on various short stories or read about all of the places she imagined visiting "someday." By the time of her...