Family Pictures: Georgia Lee Harris Haynes

Georgia Lee Harris Haynes was my paternal grandmother. She was a pastor’s wife straight to the core, and she loved cats more than anything else in this world. Although I grew into cat allergies in my preteen years, I wasn’t allergic when I was younger. I learned my first great lesson about feline feistiness when I pulled the tail of her Siamese cat named Fye. I got a painful clawscratch from one side of the face to the other, and I never did that again.

Georgia Lee was a devout As the World Turns fan. That hour was my nap time, too, if I was staying with her. When I heard the show’s theme song come on, I had to go to my dad and uncle’s growing-up room and crawl in the bed. I wasn’t allowed to watch all that kissing. That was her laundry hour – her ironing board stayed set up in the living room, and she spent the hour ironing clothes she’d pulled in off the backyard clothesline.

And she made those thin layer cakes – chocolate or caramel would be waiting under the aluminum cake cover with a dent in it each time I visited. Her choice of clothing matched the shades of her cakes always ~ browns, tans, chocolates, caramels. She wore snap-up dusters and terry cloth sock slippers with plastic soles and almost always appeared to be doing a variety of household tasks, but you’d never find her house clean. Ever. Everything was everywhere, S&S Greenstamp books included – – the complete opposite of my other grandparents, whose motto was A Place for Everything, and Everything in its Place. These two grandmothers were opposites in so many ways, but one thing they had in common was that they loved their grandchildren and great grandchildren!

Georgia Lee didn’t talk a whole lot, but I’d often look over and see that she was smiling or laughing to herself, as if she were self-amused about something only she saw. Her favorite expression: My Lands!

I love these pictures of her, rocking me in 1966 and giving my daughter, her first great-grandchild, a music box for her first birthday in January 1988 as my grandfather Haynes looked on. It seems like it was jut the blink of an eye ago, and I can still see the wonder in their eyes as they watched her fall under the music box’s magical spell.

Music Box Tricube