14 Church Street, High Shoals, NC

I remember when we moved to # 14 Church Street – I must have been about 3 years old. . I remember the weeds growing in the front yard – ones with leaves that were close to the ground, but with a tall shoot with a seed pod at the top – not dandelions – these never puffed up. But we would wrap the stem around the top and then pull on the stem closer to the top to shoot the head/seed pod at each other.
Michael used to go over that fence you can barely see at the bottom right of the picture – it was taller the closer to the road you got because of the slope of the ground – and go through the front yard of our next neighbors to the next house where the Tignors lived to get cookies from Kat Tignor. The family that lived up the street a house and on the opposite side of the street had a normal kid and one who was a dwarf. I think that their name was Godfrey.
The people who lived between us and the Tignors kept pigs in a pen at the edge of the woods. The father died while feeding the pigs and fell into the pen where they found him all trampled and covered with the vile “mud” that smells so bad. I thought that must be the most horrible way to die. They had a little girl who had a swing set in the back yard. Before her daddy died, I remember watching her swing so high and being jealous because I didn’t know how to swing that high by myself and because we didn’t have any swings.
Daddy used to plant a garden in the back yard every year. He would have someone come plow it – but I remember him having a push tiller that he used and going behind him picking up the worms so that we could go fishing when we were through with the garden. We used what mama called “hair hooks” so small you could hardly see them and “bobbers” that were about as big as your thumb nail. And she cooked whatever we caught, some so small that once they were cleaned, they weren’t much bigger than a silver dollar. We could eat them whole and not even realize there were bones because the bones were so tiny.
While we were living at # 14 Church Street, the mill started selling the houses. Daddy didn’t want to buy the one that we were in, so we moved to a brick house with a tin roof out on the 321 By-pass. The people in the big house at the bottom of Church Street moved away from their house. The people at # 4 Church Street bought the big house, and Daddy bought the house the top of the hill.