Joe Kennedy

Joe Kennedy is routinely named the region's best writer by readers of The Roanoker magazine.

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CATAWBA -- Earl Taylor sat on the porch of her little house Thursday afternoon and said deer pillaged so many of her gardens that she finally gave up growing vegetables.

"I shot at 'em but it didn't help," she said.

Her doctor told her she might as well take any money she could spend for a hearing aid and go on a cruise, because he didn't know what was wrong with her hearing.

"It's nothing but old age," she said. "I knew more about myself than he did."

She still splits wood now and then, but she no longer cuts her grass because her children won't let her.

"They'll take the gas can," she said, "and I don't have gas to use in my mower."

It's hell being 100 -- unless you're Earl Taylor.

She has lived on her 25 acres for 75 years. There, she and her husband, the late Dorsey Taylor, raised their three daughters: Kathleen Peery, 77; Hilda Wright, 75; and the late Eloise McDaniel.

Life goes on

On Sunday, Earl Garman Taylor will be honored at the annual homecoming at Shiloh United Methodist Church.

On Monday, she will turn 100.

Once the excitement passes, she'll go back to her everyday life -- cooking on the wood-burning stove that sits beside the electric range she never uses, taking off her glasses to thread a needle, making her way to the mailbox in all kinds of weather.

Several years ago, Hilda gave her cleats that attach to her boots. One icy day Taylor started out for the mail and slipped.

"I think I was probably going about 40 miles per hour when I hit an old fence," she said. As she slid, she thought about the hymn, "Going Down the Valley One by One."

Taylor started driving in 1974, one year after her husband died, and stopped when she was 90.

The first time she took the driver's test, she answered a question about which car has the right of way at an intersection with, "The one that got there first."

After going home to study the rules, she returned and passed the written part. During the road test, she told stories to distract the examiner.

"It must have worked," she said. She received her permit.

Country life

On Thursday, Taylor wore a red-and-white print dress and sported her trademark white hair. She talked about the bear and cubs she'd recently seen, the deer herd she took aim at with her .22-caliber rifle and her fear that she saw one deer fall wounded as the others ran away.

She climbed the hill across the road and saw that no deer had been hit. She was relieved.

"I just wanted to scare them," she said.

New people have come to the area but it's still purely country. In a conversation that lasted for more than an hour, not a single car passed her house.

In her youth, she and other Catawba children boarded in town to attend Salem's old high school. Taylor wasn't happy.

"I wanted to come on home and milk the old cows again," she said.

She stopped school after the 10th grade, but continued her education under two Catawba teachers who boarded with her family.

When one became ill, Taylor took over teaching grades one through four until the teacher could return.

She was 19.

"I didn't like it," she said.

She still reads a lot -- The Roanoke Times and a Billy Graham book at the moment.

Her medicines consist mostly of Tylenol and liniment, but she does not consider herself remarkable.

She is the 13th of 17 children.

Her sister Elizabeth Eakin will be 93 in October and still lives in her own Catawba home.

Her sister Gertie Damewood died at 102. And her sister Mae Peters lives in a Raleigh Court nursing home.

She is 105.

There doesn't appear to be much give-up in this bunch.

"What's the use of giving up?" Earl Taylor asked. "As long as you can go, go."