Confessions of an Outer Banks Filly
by Sybil Austin Skakle
$15.95 paperback, 160 pages
Published: November 2001
ISBN 1880849-37-2

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To a little girl observing the world from the porch above her father's store in the middle of North Carolina's Hatteras Village in the 1930s, life was inventive and wonderful. In Confessions of an Outer Banks Filly, author Sybil Skakle evokes memories of a simpler time, when children rolled hoops, played bob jacks, licked nickel ice cream cones on hot days, made tents with 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.

Mrs. Skakle, whose articles and poems have been published in periodicals around the country, brings back a vanished era with warmth and charm. Anyone who lived in Hatteras then, or has had the pleasure of visiting the town more recently, will revel in her stories about 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 tide water during a hurricane; and a ghost who played the piano in the middle of the night. She uses details large and small-The Great Depression, a Hatteras Christmas, the famous hurricane of 1936, recipes for Poor Man's Cake and Hatteras Island Pone Cake-to create a sweeping mural of life in a fishing village of five hundred people, back when all a child needed was an imagination.