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"And my dad was real good, after a long, hot day of work, there was a swimming hole on New Hope which was just down below our house. Now, he always went with us, he was good about taking us to New Hope for a dip, a cooling dip in the water. I played doll house, out there under one of the barn shelters, I fixed me up a little playhouse. I had a little kitchen, I had a little living room. You get all kind of creative things to do. I don't remember--I remember having a doll to play with and I'd play house with my doll, you know. And then I got old enough to have to join the work crowd."

"Sometimes we'll go get food, sometimes we'll, like I said, people like to make music, sometimes people hook up the studio, and then sometimes we'll just link up, turn on the beat and just freestyle for hours and just be in there chilling. And then other than that we'll go to games and stuff, like at the high school, we'll get food, that's it really."

"Our baseball was in the front yard with some tenant farmer kids who lived up the road and our balls were strings that we made, the balls that we made out of strings from the feed sack bags, you know, how you roll up like a ball. And our bat was whatever stick we found that we could strike at it with, you know. And so our ball field was the front yard."

"Well, I guess the thing that I harp on most is how kids were--what do they call them now? Free range kids? We were all free range kids, when I grew up. It was "be home by dark." Small little community, you could-- the school was sort of the hub cause we could all get there by foot or bicycle, and so, you know, we learned independence. We made up our own rules. You know, when you played ball--you had organized ball, but you kinda made up your own rules, you learned to get along, you learned if you didn't get along if there turned out to be a lot of disharmony, the game would break up. So, that was the thing that I remember that I wish kids could experience, and I know it's never going back to that, but I wish they could experience."

"We came up on a house. That's the only reason I knew where I was and then was like "yes, finally" and we got on the road and walked back on the side of the road. Never did that again, but I mean I was starting to panic because it was getting dark. Lord was looking out for us, cause that-- there's no other explanation. We just finally hit that house and I'm like "yes, I know where we are," and we walked that little mile and a half back to my grandma's, but I didn't do that again."

"We'd make mud pies, my sisters and I. We would take our--my grandma's old pie, tin pie pans, and make a little mud pie and design little--put little leaves on the top, make it cute. So that's the kinda stuff we did, we got lost in the woods once. Ended up about a mile and a half away from home once, so just walking through the woods."

"They had this vinyl like, they didn't have tile back then, but it was a roll-up vinyl sheeting they put on the floor. And my uncle who built me some furniture and I had playsets and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, and you played down there year-round 'cause it was under the house. So, anyway, Tommy would come up and play. One day we decided we needed to go skating. So we went up stairs and got a stick of butter out of the refrigerator and came down and got news papers. And we cleared the furniture. We skated, we had the best time, and just gliding around. We were greasy as a greased pig. And all I can remember is sitting in front of mama's refrigerator. His mama had come up and they were giving us a scolding."

"Daddy just took me out on back roads, and I'd--I mean, and I learned my way around Chatham County, we do--Daddy did this for sixteen years. We do re-inspections on properties that we have insured, and so when I was a teenager, on up into college, when I came home from school, daddy would come home and lay out a map cause he didn't have this back then, and, he would lay out his re-inspections and I would ride around Chatham County with his business cards and with the old black and white polaroids that you pulled apart, and take pictures of the houses. and then I would-back then, we only had the Pittsboro office, which is in the same spot, and I would meet him over there and we'd go eat lunch somewhere, but that's how I learned my way around Chatham County was doing daddy's re-inspections."

"Well, like I said we were sharecroppers and so we didn't have any money and--but my mom kept us together, and she had a little tobacco patch. And she had the money that she got from that tobacco, and so she made all of our clothes. She made them out of feed sacks, and she made our underclothes out of flour sacks. And, our little gowns and things, she made out of flour sacks and so she was very handy with a machine and so we got along fine. Now we didn't go hungry. But now we didn't have a hotdog or a hamburger, but we didn't go hungry. I think we knew that we were poor because mama gave us a quarter every Monday morning for five lunches. It was five cents a day, and, we had some girls that had a lot of money. And they--they would buy icecream and I said one day to mama, I said, “would you just please give me a nickel for icecream?” She said, “Alma I can't afford it.” And that made me know that she was...hard."

"Um, I would say I had a happy childhood, you know, that we have land, we had plenty of stuff to do. We have eleven acres, five of which are fenced in. And I was pretty much--I was free to go outside and do things. And, you know, I would say they raised me with a lot of salutary neglect in that, they didn't really try to form any of my opinions. I was a free range child."

"I'm just a regular old farm girl. We were born in–I was born in the country. I always call Siler City my home because it's just, that's my home. I was born and raised here. Worked in the field, did a little bit of everything."

"You know, growing up in the country. We could create our own fun. We had these woods and ponds. And you could tramp through the woods half an afternoon looking at stuff, making up games, and trying to climb trees. We weren't really good at that, but we tried to be. But, uh, just doing that kind of thing."