Confessions of an Outer Banks Filly

To a little girl observing the world from the porch of her family's house above her father's store in the middle of Hatteras Village in the 1930s, life was inventive and wonderful: you rolled hoops, played bobjacks, licked nickel ice cream cones on hot days, built tents from the fifty-pound burlap bags the chicken feed was delivered in, and - if you were very lucky - scored a direct hit on the head of one of your father's customers when you spit carefully through a knot hole in the porch floor. In Confessions of an Outer Banks Filly, author Sybil Skakle evokes memories of simpler times with great warmth and charm. There were pre-dawn swimming lessons in a red wool bathing suit with Miss Maude, the town's Postmaster; little girls singing endless rounds of "Frankie and Johnnie" on the front porch; breakfast at the dining room table with your feet in the tidewater during a hurricane; and a ghost who played the piano in the middle of the night. The Great Depression, a Hatteras Christmas, the Hurricane of 1936, recipes for Poor Man's Cake and Hatteras Island Pone Bread, outdoor toilets, Monday washday - the smallest details combine to create a huge picture of life in a fishing village of five hundred back when all a child needed was an imagination. Readers old and young alike will be delighted.