Here we are, my brother Ken and I, November 1972. He was turning 1, and I was helping him celebrate at the round oak kitchen table where we shared so many childhood memories. Ken was the non-morning kid who hid behind the cereal box, daring anyone to look at him in the mornings and promptly growling at those who stole a glance. He turned out just great – – I couldn’t ask for a better brother, and we are blessed to be close siblings in adulthood when so many brothers and sisters aren’t. Even though he was the proverbial Grinch of his morning domain as a child, today he is in the top two percent of the most loving and giving adults I know. Kind, smart, and cool under pressure – – a very level-headed person, especially compared to me – – not always kind, not nearly as smart, and certainly not cool under pressure. Level-headed is debatable.
We’ve spent the past year cleaning out our parents’ home of long-held treasures (and some we found in seven storage units that were picked up at estate sales along the way for a retirement plan antique store they never quite got off the ground once Mom got sick). Somehow, I was fortunate enough to end up with our childhood breakfast table, and while not every memory right now with Dad brings warmth because there is a certain amount of anger in all the grief, the table is the ONE piece of furniture I can look at and actually smile and remember nothing but the happy times, including the way my brother grumped to the table in his “footer things,” pajamas with feet, slumped his blanket up in the chair, climbed up and moved “his” cereal box into a shield position like a morning cheerfulness boundary between him and the morning people family he was born into. It was an unspoken rule in our home to look anywhere but in his direction, because he was vigilantly guarding the air space on his side of the table, like a soldier in a trench with a growl gun propped and loaded.
And I think of all the coffee and conversations, decisions, laughter and tears throughout the years.
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:
Rev. Dr. Wilson Felix Haynes, Jr., with five of his great grandchildren, grandson and granddaughter in law, and me 2024
It’s been a year. Dad died on Friday the 13th of June, 2025 in the wee hours of the morning, after succumbing to complications from pulmonary fibrosis aggravated by both colon and prostate cancers. He was an avid reader and antiquarian book collector. He never met anything he didn’t want to collect, but he couldn’t live without books. My brother Ken and I hope heaven has a big library since he couldn’t take any of them with him. Dad’s brother Greg, also a collector but who has more of a book salesman approach to managing the accumulation, is helping sell the books and getting them to “all the right targets,” as Dad so famously desired. A book in the right hands is indeed able to change the world.
Dad’s dog, Kona, brought the most comfort in his final years
Heavenly Tanka
today marks one year
that we haven’t had you here
(are there books up there??)
more important: are there dogs?
most important: Mom is there…..
My brother Ken “explains” to Dad’s beloved dog Kona that she was not purposely abandoned; we needed her to see what happened. Dad chose a family from their daily dog park romps to adopt her.
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
As I go through family photos this month in the process of digitizing to share with other family members, if I had to choose the most common motif of place and setting in terms of geography, it would be water. It seems logical since I grew up on the coast that there would be water in our activities, but even in places that weren’t all that watery, we still managed to somehow find the water of a place wherever we went.
As a child, I’d go with my parents and grandparents to Fernandina beach to camp and fish. After a number of years of doing that, my parents and grandparents bought a place on the Sapelo River in Georgia so they could go there instead – – they traded in tents and the camper for their own place on the river and built a dock so they could leave the boat right there instead of hauling it around all the time.
We threw cast nets and trawled for shrimp, fished, and set crab pots. We could have lived pretty much off that river. Fresh seafood was always what was for dinner. My favorite part was going through the shrimp net when they pulled it up. You never knew what was going to be in there, from squid to shrimp to crabs, eels, octopus, fish, jellyfish, and even horseshoe crabs and the occasional turtle. The critters we weren’t keeping got tossed straight back into the water quickly, and that was part of my job. I had a pair of long tongs that I could use to get these things.
The day the river property sold, I wrote about it here. I also wrote about Ootie the otter, who lived in this bend of the river and naturally seemed to take to other animals and made his home base the eagle rehabilitation center run by Emmy Minor a few docks down. I loved visiting that place.
My mother, late 1970s
My mother and her father sort through a net
My mother holding up a crab with a pair of long tongs like the ones I used
My dad with a crab pot
Lowcountry Boil was dad’s specialty, and it was sometimes what we had for holidays, too. It’s hard to eat turkey when there is fresh catch, all free straight out of the river, for the taking. And it’s tastier.
My earliest memories of my maternal grandmother are conjured by the smell of Dove soap, which she always used. She was a creature of habit. Where my paternal grandmother used double coupons to buy whatever was on sale, my maternal grandmother stuck with the tried and true brands that she trusted. Dove soap was among them, and every time I see a bar of that classic white arced-shape seal that reminds me of a golf club driver head or whenever smell it, I think of her.
She was born Eunice Catherine Sands in Tattnall County, Georgia July 14, 1923 and she died of Parkinson’s Disease February 16, 2009. She and my grandfather retired to Glennville, Georgia after she’d worked at the Sears Catalog Company in Waycross, Georgia and he’d worked for the Southeastern Coastline Railroad in Waycross. They’d lived in Blackshear for jobs, but they’d moved back to the farm where she’d grown up with her parents and into the tiny one-bedroom place that became a Vidalia Onion farm; then, someone bought that house and moved off the farm when my grandparents built a new brick house with full rose gardens and lovely grounds because of my grandmother’s green thumb (my mother inherited the green thumb, but I did not). Incidentally, I’ve often wondered, since the link between herbicides and Parkinson’s Disease has been discovered, whether my mother’s and grandmother’s diseases were environmental rather than hereditary. I don’t know enough about the historical causes of death to draw it back and look for patterns.
In the photo below, likely taken somewhere between Claxton, Georgia and Glennville, Georgia between 1915 and 1930, you can see Eunice’s father, Clarence K. Sands, far left, sitting with a fellow named Slater Tootle, a doctor’s son, in the carriage. Standing to the right of them is John Holmes Sands, my great grandfather Clarence’s brother, who went by Holmes. Of course, the danger of all these old family photos starts with a wonder or two, and then a rabbit hole of genealogy with full searches of all the people close to them and what they did and whatever became of the horse. And whether or not they, too, used Dove soap or made their own from lye in their backyard like my other great grandparents.
The photo below, while not dated anywhere on the back, appears to have been taken somewhere in the latter years of high school or as a senior photo.
Here I am with my grandmother in the photo below. My mother simply wrote “69” on the back of the photo, indicating the year. Since the azaleas are in full bloom in their yard in Blackshear, Georgia, I can tell I was just a few months shy of 3, so my grandmother would have been 46 in this picture.
The photo below was taken in our den in Reynolds, Georgia, and was taken in September 1971 – two months before my baby brother Ken arrived. Eunice is holding me and my armful of Barbies, and her son, my uncle Robert, is in the photo too. He was graduating and going into the military. There’s another story here in the photo, too. Dad never met anything he didn’t start to collect, and all those bottles were dug up from the dump in Reynolds. I still remember going out with them and digging near a small creek to help them find these and clean them. They used bookshelves to add to the collection before the book collection took over. I saved a few of them (including the smaller of the two guitar shaped bourbon bottles, and my brother took the larger one) after Dad died, and while my brother and I sold the tall shelf on the right to a family who could love it more than we could, I kept the secretariat that is behind my uncle – – it’s the oldest piece of furniture I remember in our home all those years, going way back to our Kentucky days.
I also found the picture below interesting, too. This is my grandmother’s sister, Madelle, left, on the swing, with my mother at her feet. Madelle’s friend Doretha Dyess is pictured there with my mother’s childhood dog named Tippie (later, she and my uncle would have chihuahuas named Tootsie and Topper, so this makes me wonder whether I get my love of the sound of similar words from my mother – – or whether one of my grandparents did the actual naming of dogs).
And as I discovered names and dates of family members, the most interesting fact was the discovery of my great grandfather’s middle name. The K in Clarence K. Sands stands for Kenneth. My brother’s name is Kenneth, and I had no idea he was named for our maternal great grandfather! It’s surprising what you can learn when you take time to snoop around the family tree.
And for today, a Zip Ode for Glennville, Georgia, where the Sands family cemetery is. Glennville’s Zip Code is 30427, and for this poem I’ve used each digit of the zip code to determine how many words each line gets. Zeros are wild cards where you can pick any number of words 1-9 or use a symbol or emoji.
Common Threads 