This story was excerpted from a workshop conducted in Yancey County, North Carolina in September 2026 with RL Silvers

Yeah, we lived all the way in the head of the holler. Had a pair of mule that put on the hillside, plant, what was it, plant corn. I’d go ahead and plow that was a number 10 fulcum plow. One of them mule be a buzzer for her, and one of them be in the fur, and he’s real easy learn to plow, you know. I’d plant that field down. Then he’d come about a month after that. I’d hard down with our big old “A Har” and hard down when my daddy get up front lay it off and when one of us go through there and plant that corn every 17 inches, and he wouldn’t plant that corn to a certain time when the chidilings went to hurry hollering in the wood, come all the way up from Florida and Georgia. When them childilings went to the holler, he says it’s all right now to plant your corn. It won’t get killed or frost. And that’s when we plant the corn. We planted that corn. He’d go through the, what they call a cultivator. He’d plant that corn there as young as he built with a hole, I don’t know if you know what it all is or not,  but he’d take the hole and we’d cut the weeds out of it, hold that corn, had to hold good too. Oh man, get a limb after us if we didn’t hold it good. Them old chitilings went to heart. He chased corn plant. At those with the old people, they had a thing if they went by, you know, their head. And we plant that corn, they get up, get roast gears on it. Then Mary, they get hard, you know. That corn get hard. We both go back to the pile and get at that corn. We, I’d take two rows, my dad’d take two rows, and my mother take two rows. We’d pull that corn off the stalk and throw it up the hill in a pile, and then we’d come through there with a team of mules and a sled, pitch all that corn in that sled, and take it down to barn. Throw it down the barn, or we can chuck it. I did a lot of crazy things.