The sun has just set over the tall pines lining Beaver Creek Road, and Erma Sikes cautiously makes her way outside leaning on an old chopping hoe.

She says she has two walkers and a cane, but nothing supports her quite like a hoe. Sikes has just celebrated her 100th birthday, and by all accounts is spry as 90.

Because her eyes are sensitive to sunlight, Sikes stays inside until the sun has begun to descend. By dusk she's found her hoe and is walking down a sandy dirt path to the turnip patch past an abandoned chicken house and barn. Her comfort with the chopping hoe, as she calls it, represents a lifetime of having its smooth-as-mahogany handle in her calloused hands.

"I don't even have a memory of anything before tobacco," said Sikes who was born to a tobacco and cotton farmer in Franklin County.

She was in the fields by the time she could walk since there was always something to be done no matter how small you might be. "My daddy would give me a penny for every tobacco worm I pulled off the leaves," she said. "You could get a writing pencil for two cents." Pencils and candy were her favorite purchases.

"I'd grab a cup and me and my oldest brother Rufus would go fill 'em up with worms."

Taking a turn past the house, and pausing under an abundant pecan tree that her son Walter Lee recalls they planted 50 years ago, Sikes bends as easily as a child and picks up pecans off the ground. Not satisfied with their smallish size, she looks up into the branches, and uses her hoe to pull a branch within reach where the meatier pecans still nestle among the leaves.

The homestead, built in 1914, is a sparse house but still standing strong with a boxed hedge running round the front, cedar trees flanking front and back.

Sikes moved to this 75-acre farm in Chatham County just past what is Ebenezer Point today, with her husband Samuel Sikes and eldest son, Walter Lee, on Dec. 15, 1937.

"There were nothing but farms up and down the whole road," says Walter Lee.

Sikes echoes that memory, and says when the government built Jordan Lake over half of their neighboring farmers left the tight-knit community on Beaver Creek Road. As the oldest member of Ebenezer Methodist Church, Sikes is a testament to the way things used to be on this large tract of tobacco farming land.

Wesley, her second son and only neighbor, walks over to check on his mother and brother. He too pauses under the pecan tree in this crisp November day, and the family seems to be lost in a distant dream, back when tobacco framed the land, and chickens were in the hatchery, hogs in the pen and cattle in the pasture. Each has a tie to a way of life that was once the norm here in the Piedmont and slowly slipping away with the passing of each man and woman who labored by the sweat of their brow.

Until the age of 64, Sikes worked alongside her husband in the fields. The tobacco farm was forced into retirement when the government took surrounding land on Beaver Creek Road to to build Jordan Lake in the '70s. Walter Lee points out how they were moving toward stopping the tobacco because of the negativity beginning to surround the crop. "We'd planned to stop in the next two years," he said.

Sikes calls tobacco farming hard, dirty work, but quickly added. "We missed it a lot .. It was all I knowed, tobacco and cotton."

The family branched out, selling poultry to the chicken processing plants in Pittsboro and Sanford. "At one point we had 12,000 chickens, that was a lot of chickens 56 years ago," says Walter Lee who operated the hatchery on his own after his father retired.

The passing of Sam, as Sikes calls him, in 1994 ended the era of having a working farm.

Sikes, who survived the Great Depression and remembers her three sons lying on quilts by the side of a field while she worked from sun-up to sun-down, a woman whose first two sons died shortly after childbirth, still calls the passing of her husband the hardest grief she's ever had to deal with.

Leaning against her hoe, petite and trim, Sikes does not carry the burden of living 100 years. But inside in the dimly lit house, with her milky eyes straining to see the text in a large-print book, it hits you: living a century isn't as simple as the gracious Sikes makes it seem.

Shadows began to deepen the evening air, and Sikes recalls the train whistle that used to announce itself freight cars pulling in and out of New Hope Valley Road in Bonsal, less than four miles from the family farm.

Today there is no train whistle but you hear the songs of birds, and the rustle of squirrels burying pecans. Sikes takes one more round along the perimeter of the house before going in to fix dinner for herself and Walter Lee. "Maybe some turnip greens, and mashed potatoes will be the thing," she muses as she places her hoe by the back steps.

Rebekah Cowell is a freelance writer in Chatham County.