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Here is “Round 20 ” of your insights into how to know if someone is from North Carolina. You may also want to check out

• Round One (February 2004)
• Round Two (March 2004)
• Round Three (May 2004)
• Round Four (July 2004)
• Round Five (August 2004)
• Round Six (September 2004)
• Round Seven (November 2004)
• Round Eight (January 2005)
• Round Nine (February 2005)
• Round Ten (March 2005)
• Round Eleven (April 2005)
• Round Twelve (May 2005)
• Round Thirteen (June 2005)
• Round Fourteen (August 2005)
• Round Fifteen (September 2005)
• Round Sixteen (October 2005)
• Round Seventeen (November 2005)
• Round Eighteen (December 2005)
• Round Nineteen (January 2006)

If you can think of anything to add to this list, send it to us:

E-mail: Carolina.country@ncemcs.com
Mail: P.O. Box 27306, Raleigh, NC 27611.
Phone: (919) 875-3062.

From Mabel Couch, Winston Salem

• A boy orders an RC and a Moon Pie on his first teenage date.
• The girls on Dutchman Creek near Elkin could build a dam, tuck their skirts in their feedsack bloomers, grab a grapevine and jump in for a splash.
• A girl could be a champion tree climber in her community.
• You used the dasher and wooden churn to make butter.
• You attended a corn shucking and raced to see who could get the most red ears.
• You watched the wheat threshing machine at work at grandma’s and ate the leftovers at dinnertime.

From Callie, Beaufort County

• Fried dill pickles are on the menu.
  From Janice and Preston Mobley, Pink Hill
• You know what “lighter knot” is, where to find it and what it smells like.
• When you see someone cutting a big barrel in half, they are making a new pig cooker.
• When you walk in the house and your eyes water and your nose runs from the smell of vinegar, and you know someone’s making a sauce for a pig-picking.
• You know what a looping horse is.

From Rachel Lewis Sawyer, Hertford

• You’ve put a dozen eggs in an empty oatmeal box for a neighbor.
• You have shared a tub bath by the heater with siblings in the winter and wanted to be sure others ahead of you had not had a “nature call.”
• You skimmed cream from milk, put it in a jar and shook until you had butter.
• You had light wood to help get your heater fires going faster.
• You picked potato bugs off plants and put them in a jar, and when you had 100 you got a nickel for a Pepsi.
• Someone took your chewing gum off the bedpost.
• You put old doorknobs in hen nests, so the hens would go back.

From Ruth Watson, Mount Airy

• Bananas were for Sunday pudding and not for daily eating.
• You were too tired to bathe, but you had to wash your feet.
• Saturday was the only day you went to town.
• The first load of tobacco sold meant shoes, so you could return to school.
• You drank a bottle of pop and not a soda.
• Pork ‘n’ beans, bologna and cheese and a moon pie was a luxury instead of a meal.

From Laura Collins, Rutherfordton

• You’ve ever had to switch from heat to air-conditioning in the same day.
• All the festivals across the state are named after a fruit, vegetable, grain, insect or animal.
• You install security lights on your house and garage and leave both unlocked.
• You know what “cow tipping” is.
• You only own four spices: salt, pepper, Texas Pete and Duke’s mayonnaise.
• The local papers cover national and international news on one page and six pages for local gossip and sports.
• You think that the first day of deer season is a national holiday.
• You find 100 degrees Fahrenheit “a little warm.”
• You know all four seasons: almost summer, summer, still summer and Christmas.
• You describe the first cool snap (below 70 degrees) as good pinto-bean weather.
• Fried catfish is the other white meat.

From Connie L. Lowry, Siler City

• You call your Sunday school book a “quartly.”
• Your mom calls and you will be there “da-reckly.”
• You get a new “frock” for Easter.

From Monique Smith, Erwin

• You know that mustard is not only the yellow stuff in the bottle that you put on hot dogs, but it is also a type of green vegetable.
• You know that pedal pushers are another name for Capri’s.
• You sat on the front porch with your grandmother to help her do some cannin’.
• You have to drive down a dirt road to get to church.

From Linda Dewald, Boone

• You know where Hoot Owl Holler is.
• You know where to pick chestnuts up on the mountain.
• You sold pine tips, sassafras roots and wild vines for money.
• You walked the railroad tracks until a train passed and the conductor would throw out candy and suckers.
• You caught lightning bugs and stuck them on your face to glow at night.
• Your elders told you Raw Hide and Bloody Bones would get you if you left the yard.
• You know who Old Tom Dooley was.
• You’ve made huckleberry jam.
• You have shaved a birch twig down for a toothbrush.

From Marie Wall Harris, Yadkinville

• You know that “fetch it” means bring it to me right now!
• You know that “tag-a-long” means you come with me.
• You know that “slop the hogs” means to feed them.
• You know that the little leg of a chicken is really part of the wing.
• You say, “yank it out” when you mean pull it out.
• You say, “ought!” when something hurts.
• You say, “aught,” instead of zero.
• You know “shape up” means quit making a fool of yourself.
• You have painted your fingernails and toenails with pokeberry juice.
• You know that you “gravel” under potato vines for the spuds.
• You say, “I’m give out” when you have worked hard and need to rest.
• You say that you will have something done “in a skip and hop.”
• You know that you only wear patched clothes in the field or at home – nowhere else.
• You used white bleached sacks to make sheets and pillowcases.

From Judy G. Greenamyer, Lake Wylie, S.C.

• You ask someone to raise the window down.
• You tell someone not to pay that nary bit of attention.
• They think that’ll draw up when it’s washed.
• You hear someone say, “Ouch, I stumped my toe!”
• When giving directions to someone lost from another state, you tell them to start all over by going back where they came from.

From Tyler Lee, Hillsborough

• You use daddy’s John Deere lawn mower as a cross-country four-wheeler.
• You grow okra and tomatoes in the back pasture.
• You go down a dirt road and see farmers moving cattle from one pasture to another across the road.
• The whole family went to pick strawberries at a “pick-your-own-strawberries” farm.
• You see half of the people that go to your school at Bojangles every morning.

From Cathy Wallace Crumpler, Mount Olive

• You have walked behind your father’s John Deere tractor while he was plowing land just to cool your feet in the freshly plowed soil.
• You have walked an oil drum on its side with a cousin and have the scraped knees to prove it.
• You have stayed up late watching falling stars and catching fire flies in Duke’s Mayonnaise jars.
• You rode to the beach in the car with the windows down and your feet hanging out the window.
• You have made mud pies (mud chicken legs, mud potatoes or whatever was on the menu) with a Pepsi bottle of water, sandy dirt and mama’s old pie tins.
• You have made hula skirts from “chinny ball” tree limbs so you could pretend you were in an exotic place.
• You’ve climbed pecan trees to retrieve cats, bomb your sister with pecans or just to look down the road to see if the mailman was coming.

From Gaston Dutton, Monroe

• You walked or trotted four miles to church on Sunday because the mules were too tired to pull the buggy.
• You planted excess collards in order to make green collard kraut.
• Some of your bad neighbors stole cured corn at night, placed it in bags and sold it back to the owner who farmed and ran a small country store.
• You were allowed as a small boy to stop work at noon on Saturdays in the summer and go creek hunting for snapping turtles.
• You shucked corn for neighbors after sundown with a lantern and then ate a hearty meal listening to the community banjos, harmonica and fiddlers.

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