The Moonshiner's Daughter

by Donna Everhart

How could I ever feel part of this family when I didn’t understand what they felt, or where it came from, that pride and honor? It would be like thinking I was beautiful and popular. It would be false.

There was a different smell to the air. Instead of fertile, pungent soil, and comfortable dry breezes scented with the pine, cedar, and wildflowers I was accustomed to, there was a different sultry odor, one that was seaweed-scented, briny with an overlying fishy odor carried on warm, moist wind. I could hear a flock of birds overhead, calling to one another in a high-pitched cry, all of them white with varying colors of gray and black on their wings.