My Daddy, Herman Oakley, farmed my grandma’s land as a sharecropper. When I was a child, we didn’t have a lot of store-bought toys. Daddy made water guns from limbs of elderberry bushes and flutes from limbs of sourwood trees. He made spinning tops from wooden thread spools and swings from old plow ropes tied on a tree limb. He was a great storyteller, too, for us and most of the neighborhood. He died at age 93.

Bonnie O. Briggs, Roxboro, Piedmont EMC