Sometimes the picture speaks in ways we cannot. I’ve been sifting through tubs and tubs of family photos, digitizing them and organizing them in folders to share with family members who, like me, would rather have them on a flash drive than taking up prime real estate in photo albums in the back of the attic. In some cases, I’m sharing via Facebook Messenger if I find those taken with friends who would enjoy the throwback. On a random weekday morning last week, I sent this one to my childhood friend Nancy so we could both remember the years we created floral arrangements with the help of our mothers as we competed in the annual Garden Club’s Christmas Flower Shows.
My friend Nancy (right) and me at the annual Garden Club’s Christmas Flower Show, early 1970s
I wasn’t expecting this response, and it showed me how the power of the photograph can often reach back through the years and find the places that older generations can remember – – like trying to scratch an itch that you never quite can find, and then suddenly you find the sweet spot of relief. This is Nancy’s reply:
On Chick Fil A Dogs-in-the-Drive-Thru night, we loaded up Boo Radley and Ollie and took them to get a free bandana, while supplies lasted. And supplies lasted long enough for us to get there between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. to snag two.
Boo Radley
Ollie
Well-behaved, loving Schnoodle
Behaviorally challenged Schnoodle with T-Rex tendencies
Instructions for Dogs-In-The-Drive-Thru Night
ask dogs if they “wanna go” and when
they act a fool and can’t contain themselves
put them in the car to go adventuring
be sure to put the windows down for Ollie
so he doesn’t get car sick
let them ride with ears flapping all the way
to Chick Fil A and assure the worker taking the order
that Boo is in fact an aberrant out-of-control schnoodle
and not a small T-Rex left over from the Jurassic era
then order chicken nuggets to share with the heathens for dinner
pull up and get the free bandanas that have now
managed to cost you your entire peaceful evening
along with any sanity you had before embarking on
the “adventure” for the “free” bandana along with half
your nuggets and fries then roll up the windows
and go home, muttering over and over again
we’re never doing this again……
but smile that you got the pictures of the one time
Then God told Noah, “Come out of the ark. And bring the animals with you so they can be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” So Noah and his family came out with all the animals (Genesis 8:13–19).
Mallory, 1989, holding a Calico Critter in the ark
When my children were little, my parents had wooden arks and every kind of animal you could imagine to go on the ark. They didn’t limit ark tickets to animals, either; they weren’t concerned about the Biblical accuracy of the species. We were an inclusive family who had the entire set of the California Raisins and Disney characters (and I think we really did have 101 Dalmatians) from Happy Meal toys, Calico Critters, Where’s Waldo figures, and even Pac Man pairs – in addition to the standard elephants, giraffes, monkeys and so forth on our arks.
The only things my oldest daughter wanted from the house when we were cleaning were the California Raisins. I managed to find several and send them to her, and today they sit in her home in Henderson, Nevada. These memories of ark days still bring joy to her, and in the photos I can see the grandmother/granddaughter bond of love as they chat and spend time – something my mother always did well. Mom could have taught a Masterclass on embracing all kinds, even those who may not appear to belong on the ark. She made room, just like I’m sure Noah did back in the day.
Calling All Animals: A Noah’s Ark Golden Hinge Poem
so Noah and his family came out with all the animals
Noah brought animals of all kinds ~ California Raisins, 101 Dalmatians,
and even PacMan and Waldo – – all kinds, not just
his own ideas of what was ordinary…..he surely looked at all his own
family and knew all their ways of belonging, then
came to decide that all creatures, even those
out of left field or from off the beaten path, and all those
with their own quirks and all their issues, yes,
all ….all….all….should be welcomed onto
the ark, for all of God’s children are, truly,
animals, after all……
Mallory playing with the arks, around 1990 (a California Raisin is wearing a Santa hat directly above her right hand)
Mallory and Mimi (my mother) talking, while my son Marshall holds Happy Meal toy Anne-Marie from All Dogs Go to Heaven
My grandmother Haynes was a master seamstress. Georgia Lee Harris Haynes made most all her own clothes until her later years, except the Toughskins jeans for her wild-acting boys. Even Sears and Roebuck had to double down on strong threads for boys who ran the dirt roads of rural Georgia barefoot, fishing in creeks and sliding into the water on rocks. It was a skill that served all homemakers well back in those days, and as children of the Great Depression, these were the women who hoarded spools of thread like they were silver. Understandably. I would have been one of them, too, holding tight to everything I had.
Georgia Lee and W.F. Haynes, Sr. on a front porch in Waycross, Georgia late 1930s
I don’t remember my grandmother Jones ever sewing anything, but my mother sure did! She made us matching dresses throughout the years just like Maria and all those children in The Sound of Music wearing the living room drapes all through the town. She made most of her formals, including her own wedding dress and veil. Instead of carrying a bouquet, she fashioned a Bible with ribbons streaming down – the one thing I saved along with her wedding album.
And she tried to teach her daughter to do so much more than buttons and shoulder ties and elastic waists and bias tape for reversible wraparound skirts, but I threw my hands up in holy hell at zippers and cried real tears of frustration just like I did with piano lessons and the clarinet, and that was that. I made it through basic sewing training, but I never became a master seamstress in the footprints of the women before me. Now, I mostly make flannel rag quilts for my grandchildren on my mother’s prized Bernina machine, one of her most beloved treasures, and I think she’d be proud to know that it’s currently being used to make a stars-and-stripes-and narwhals quilt for her great grandson due to arrive July 4, 2026.
Miriam Ruth Jones marrying W.F. Haynes, Jr., on Saturday, June 20, 1964 – Waycross, Georgia
Easter Outfits Sunday, April 11, 1971 – Reynolds, Georgia – Mom was just a couple months pregnant with my brother, Ken, who would arrive in November
Christmas 1974, Blackshear, Georgia at my Jones Grandparents’ house in front of the tinsel tree in matching dresses
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!
My firstborn, Mallory, with great grandparents Georgia Lee and W. F.
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.
February 1978 my brother Ken and me with Granny Haynes
Granny Haynes on the front row, far right, at Calvary Baptist Church in Gilchrist Park
My great grandmother, Lena May Haynes, is seen in the photo above on the front row of Calvary Baptist Church in Waycross, Georgia, where she raised her nine living (of ten) children after my great grandfather died at 57 of heart complications. She lived in a small cinder block house where the kitchen was the heart of the home that had just two bedrooms, as I recall. I don’t know where everyone slept, but I do know one of her girls lost a toe when one of the boys chopped it off with an ax or a hatchet while making lye soap in a big pot in the back yard.
My late father wrote a piece on her life, which I’m including below, and I took that text and created a found poem from it.
I’m sorting family pictures this month, making piles of who gets what from the Haynes family photo albums. After Dad died last June, we found tubs and shoeboxes and plastic bins and entire furniture drawers filled with ephemera, memorabilia, sentiments, and photos. And just about everything else. Photos are all over the place in the house, but it’s work that has to be done. And I’m likely among the last generation of humans who will ever do this sort of thing now that pictures are mostly digital. I wish all of this were reduced to one simple thumb drive, but the upside is that I’m walking down memory lane and have found a theme for the month of June: family pictures. Perhaps the easiest way to let go of old photos – and lingering grief – is to give them their proper moment in the spotlight and then share with others who can decide whether to keep or discard them. I have already tossed many, but the remaining ones had some reason to land in the truck to bring home on our last trip south.
Today, I am sharing a few photos of my mother when she was a young girl. I’m using the acrostic form to capture the spirit of Miriam Ruth Jones Haynes. She was a spitfire as a child, and when she became a pastor’s wife, she was a slightly more polite spitfire. She and my father were high school sweethearts, and when she went off to Florida State University, she missed him so much that she went home to see him and the rest is history. She quit college to join him in Macon, Georgia at Mercer University as he finished his degree and went on to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. I get my love of the outdoors from her. I wish I’d gotten a whole lot more of her, but here we are…..
Miriam
Made most of her own clothes on her sewing machine
Including her wedding dress and prom dresses
Ran around on a mule named Festus with her cousin Billy
My mother’s father, James Earl Jones, holding a family picture, – Christmas 1988
I’m sorting family pictures this month, making piles of who-might-want-what from the Haynes family photo albums. After Dad died, my brother and I discovered tubs and shoeboxes and plastic bins and entire furniture drawers filled with ephemera, memorabilia, sentiments, and photos. And just about everything else (he never threw anything away). Ken and my sister-in-law Jennifer have done the daddy lion’s share of the work of sifting and sorting and all the things that go with closing down a life or two, so these tasks of what remains that can be done from my home five hours north are gratifying and fulfilling to be able to contribute.
Photos were all over the place in the house, but figuring out what to do with them is no small task. I should be more grateful: I’m likely among the last generation of humans who will ever do this sort of thing now that pictures are mostly digital. I wish all of these snapshots were reduced to one simple thumb drive, but the upside is that I’m walking down memory lane and have found a theme for the month of June (and the rest of 2026, in a way): family pictures. Perhaps the easiest way to let go of old photos is to give them their proper moment in the spotlight and then share with others who can decide what fits into their lives to carry forward, and whether to keep or discard them. I have already tossed many, but the remaining ones landed in our truckbed to bring home on our most recent trip south.
If you’re a blog reader who has ever dreamed of taking pen to paper and writing, or if you’re a reader with a blog of your own and would like to join me in sorting your own family photos and sharing your stories, I invite you to come along and see what we can all unearth from the annals of time as we welcome the month of June. There’s really nothing quite like family photos to spark memories that inspire stories and writing.
So to start, I’ve created a system that I hope will help me simplify and sort. Below are the blog logos and themes I plan to use for the remainder of this year using family photos to drive poems and stories. I’m using them to designate piles to sort my photos and begin writing. Under each logo is a caption with the category I’ll use as I sort……I invite you to use the same system and share your photos and stories, too, allowing the memories to drive the writing and the writing to preserve all our family stories and traditions.
I’ve learned that if you don’t like a style of a painting, you can switch books and try again. Two paintings of the very same thing will give you a whole different way of painting it, and as a lover of lily pads and water lilies since childhood, I wanted a less finished look, more watery and abstract than my first lily painting with the harder lines. It’s an important thing to know. My friend Glenda encouraged me to try my bird of paradise again, after painting one I did not like. I plan to do that, but first I saw a lily that invited me to do the same thing, and I learned something about watercolor painting.
I learned I like the watery, unfinished look of things, where the lines are free to blur and the color can you outside the lines and look better than it does when it doesn’t spill out. Take this second lily, for example. It needs more green in the leaf part, but look at the top petals. It’s reassuring that not everything has to live within the lines or be all the same expected shades and colors to be pretty. I like that about watercolors, and I like that about life and people.
Now take a look at this ugly watercolor lily pad below, the one that looks like a moldy croissant or a sideways-sleeping green zebra from the back end. The colors don’t bleed right, and my learning that happened here was in discovering the kind of paintings I like to see and do. I learned I like things less realistic and more abstract, with softer lines, softer colors, and more blur.
Every step, every mistake and delight in the painting journey is an opportunity for reflection on the process and the product. From the beginning of the first book to the middle of the second book I’ve been working through, I’m feeling the joy of creating something each time I sit down and pick up a brush. And I surprise myself sometimes with those little details that turn out in some paintings. Like knowing a style of shoes or clothes, and taking an armful of outfits into the dressing room to find that one fits and most don’t and it’s okay to not like everything even though it looked good for a minute on the mannequin or the hanger.
Throughout the month of May, I’ve been sharing watercolors and learning along the way. This is a hobby I’ll continue. I dream of weekends where I can go kayaking with my son and his growing family along the South Carolina coast, and weekends where I can go out west and paint with my daughters in the desert when I retire and have more time to get away. If I were painting with my daughters tomorrow, for example, this is how I would envision it:
For the month of June, my blog theme will be Family Photos. I’m sorting large tubs of pictures my brother and I have been staring at in a corner of Dad’s house as we’ve scratched our heads and wondered just what should become of them. So I brought them home with me on my last trip there and will attempt to make sense of the process by sharing some of the pictures here and writing the stories before passing some on and keeping some. If you’re a blog reader who has ever dreamed of taking pen to paper and writing, or if you’re a reader with a blog of your own and would like to join me in sorting your own family photos and sharing your stories, I invite you to come along and see what we can all unearth from the annals of time as we welcome the month of June.
I knew when I painted a fern branch earlier this month that it would be my favorite of all the firsts. It looked real, with the variegated green leaves and authentic stems, like I’d plucked it fresh from the edge of the forest lining my driveway and placed it right here on the paper. It appeals to my simple side – – just two colors and one brush, a recycled coconut Oui glass yogurt container filled with water, and a page-bound piece of watercolor paper. And the directions.
Yes! Finally, something that looked real and that might be framed in an art gallery by some lesser-known semi-famous watercolor artist from a rural town in middle Georgia.
I liked it, so I set out to use the plain white notecards I’d found in the craft section of one of our six local Dollar Generals no more than five miles apart on every map throughout the southeastern United States to create a hand-painted notecard. And I worked and worked and started loving it, too…..until…..
Screenshot
…two little leaves halfway down the page and to the left of the stem became problematic. Instead of leaving them as their own sort of natural trouble, I started trying to fix them with my human eyes and perceptions of how fern leaves should look. And tried and tried, and ended up with what looked like two leaves on a stem that a novice watercolor human had tried unsuccessfully to fix. Definitely not those up to par with a semi-famous rural watercolor artist.
I’d heard that “all art is fixable,” a long time ago. I decided to text my older daughter, who had been to college as an art major, for tips on what to do. I sent her the picture and asked if she could find the mistake, thinking maybe it was just me, measuring with my own human eyes my perceptions of what a leaf should be. But she, too, found it and marked it up in her phone and sent the photo back like she’d found 1990s-famous Waldo in a red and white striped shirt sticking out like a sore thumb.
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And she suggested what to do to make the art fixable…..painting a caterpillar “or something.” We continued texting, and what I love about texting with my children is that while we are talking about fixing art, we are really talking about life and its universal transfers to deeply held beliefs. I thumbed through my watercolor book and found both a ladybug and a caterpillar and decided on the caterpillar. I did NOT like that ladybug, even though I tried painting it. The legs looked a little off.
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I like, too, that even though she was an art major and has so much natural talent, we are both using our “training wheel” books with the picture already sketched onto watercolor book paper. She will bloom in creativity far more quickly than I will, as she’s already ventured into salt watercolor painting, her own sketches, using filters on her camera to change photos she takes to a watercolor filter to see how she might paint something, and inherently knows more about the artistic techniques that she can apply from other art forms to watercolor painting.
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And I really love that a 59-year old mother trying a new hobby can ask her 39-year old daughter who naturally gravitates to all things art like a duck takes to water, what to do about my fern leaf failure. And I love that I took her advice. I found my caterpillar directions in my training wheel book and painted this caterpillar in a smaller form, over those two bad leaves. And as soon as I began, I knew that my next lesson needed to be on perspective and dimension. I’m not sure whether the watercolor training wheel books can teach those skills, but I’m going to go into every painting henceforth reminding myself that caterpillars in the wild do not dangle like gymnasts on parallel bars from fern leaves. But my daughter, ever the optimist, found a way to add an encouraging sentiment in the text thread.
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I think I like caterpillars on branches much better….and the more conceptual version of leaves, too.
Move over, Eric Carle……there’s a new hungry caterpillar in rural Georgia dangling by one suckerfoot from a fern, eating all the greenery on her quest to grow a pair of painted wings….. and take flight.
Common Threads 