I’d carried the label of tomboy as far back as I could remember, hated dresses, and chose shoe wear for practicality. Today’s church attire was bell-bottom corduroys I’d lifted from Mama’s side of the closet and a plain white V-neck T-shirt I’d lifted from Pa’s side. It was as dressy as I was going to get. Charlotte liked to sass about me being stuck in the seventies, but she had no idea just how deeply I was stuck there and that I would do anything to go back.

You’d have thought with us being the only two girls out of the seven siblings that we would have had a tighter bond. Maybe if there had been less than the six years’ age difference, or if I had been more agreeable . . .

Pixy bumped into my leg, grunted, and then plopped down on the worn pine floor at my feet. Her earthy scent mingled with the lemon oil I’d used yesterday to wipe down the pews. I moved over to give her more sprawling room, but that only made her scoot until she’d eliminated the space between us and was right back to nuzzling my foot. Pixy had issues. Namely her identity crisis. She thought she was a five-pound poodle. She wasn’t. Pixy was actually a thirty-six-pound potbelly pig.

With the town viewing us as riffraff, it wasn’t surprising to find animals dropped off near the front of our 850-acre farm. I’d found Pixy tied to the mailbox a few years back. Another time, we discovered a billy goat had wandered up to the house and was gnawing on the porch rail one morning. We named him Woody, for obvious reasons.

Animals weren’t the only surprises people left for us. One time it was a stolen car left in the west field. Pa called the cops on that one. And he should have called about another surprise gift but chose to handle it in his own special Dave Foster way.

The guesthouse tucked in the western part of the farm was considered to have an open door to anyone needing a place to stay for a while. A Native American couple from the Lumbee Tribe found their way to Nolia Farms one spring. Some didn’t care for that, namely grown men parading around like ghosts, and so a cross was erected in our yard and set afire. Pa, being Pa, rushed into the house, and we all prepared ourselves for him returning with the shotgun. Instead, he came outside with a bag of marshmallows and skewers fashioned from wire hangers.

As those fools in white robes and pointy hats watched on, we roasted marshmallows and sang “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Their ringleader accused Pa of blasphemy, but Pa shut that down with a confidence Dave Foster wore better than his denim shirt. Mama said that shirt made her swoon, so there’s that.