I grew up on a farm in the piedmont of North Carolina. My maternal grandfather was an alcoholic; therefore, I had a mother who had grown up with shame embedded into her being. A year after my grandmother died, my grandfather, who whittled fishing poles for his grandchildren, spent his whittling time one summer to fashion a strong tree limb into the shape of a Y and in the nighttime hours on a humid night in July of 1951, a muffled sound was not loud enough for anyone to investigate. It was in the dawn of the new day that it was discovered he had gotten into a hurry to leav more...
