I went for a quick getaway to Ellijay, Georgia between Dad’s funeral and the tasks of cleaning out a house and storage rooms with my brother. Somehow, my thoughts went straight to visiting vineyards, and I think I found a retirement plan up there waiting for me in the North Georgia mountains. Crisp air, majestic views, friendly dogs, tasty wines – – just add friends and family, coffee, a fire pit with an Adirondack chair and a book, and…..that’s the life for me! It’s just the medicine I needed for these days in between – – similar to the kind of medicine Dad described in one of his final conversations with us. You can listen here:
Dog-Friendly Vineyard Retirement Dream Haiku
my retirement dream
is pouring wine tastings for
people and their pets
because the longer
the people sit and sample,
the better life gets!
My Schnoodle Fitz at Grapes and Ladders Vineyard – even though he didn’t have any wine, he got happier and happier as folks came over to pet him and tell him he’s so cute – and that’s the dog version of fine wine.
Today’s Shadorma was inspired by Dad’s views on women in leadership roles. You can listen below to his story he shared about the power of women in ministry, words from the heart spoken by our Southern Baptist father as told to his two Southern Baptist children (one of us is currently married to a member of the Catholic faith, and one of us formerly was) in his final days of life. The thing about Dad was his love for others. ALL others, even those who believed differently from him. His full embrace of humanity far exceeded differences of religion, politics, sexual orientation, and race. He even loved those who didn’t like Georgia Bulldog football or the Atlanta Braves.
It all had something to do with the way his mother demonstrated this first. He learned from her. Take a listen:
This month, I’m sharing stories I captured on audio in the final days of Dad’s life. There were funny moments, serious moments, sad moments – – all of them with levity and meaning. In today’s audio below, listen for the phrase “the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.” Translation: someone passed every level of acceptance and had made it to the inner circle of the Haynes family. While every family has its way of declaring their acceptance of a new member of the fold, this was Dad’s – – and, of course, we as his children had to get through the tests of our own spouses’ families’ gate keeping systems, too.
At our family dinner following the graveside burial, all in attendance were invited to share stories. My husband, eyes brimming with tears as they often do when something hits deep, stood and shared the story of the day he’d “done the old-fashioned thing and asked Felix if he could marry his daughter.” He described the scene: there they were, standing at the top of the dock along the Sapelo River, Spanish Moss gently blowing in the limbs of the Live Oaks, where Briar had expected it to be just him and Felix.
Only it wasn’t.
Felix was “the easy one to get by,” he shared. Miriam……..not so much. But there he was, face to face Felix AND with Miriam and all her intuition, when Dad looked over at Mom and saw that Briar got a passing score – so Dad gave Briar his blessing with two conditions: 1) “get your arms around the kids;” and 2) “encourage Kim to finish her doctoral program.” Briar had just received the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
He was in! And 17 years into our marriage, Briar has done both of the things my father asked of him – the kids love him, and I finished my doctoral program, ten months after Mom died of complications from Parkinson’s Disease. Even though she wasn’t physically present to see these things happen, somehow I know she knew. She knows everything, still.
Fast forward to June 2025. In the hospital room with Felix were Ken and Jennifer and I. Somewhere between Heaven and Earth, Mom stepped from behind the veil to join Dad and deliver a message to Ken and Jennifer through Dad’s words.
Did Jennifer get the Haynes family’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval?
She got The Grand Slam Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval!
Like John Muir, I often feel the mountains calling…..and I must go.
I was reminded of a story Dad told about his grandfather who once lived in Gainesville, Georgia, a mountainous area of our home state. Somewhere along the way, a rock marking his homestead was moved from that place in Gainesville by a family member to Dad’s house on St. Simons Island, Georgia, and one day this month, my brother and I will be retrieving it to go to our cousin Kathy Gilmer’s house. Kathy is compiling a book of family stories and will be the next keeper of the rock. I’ve often wondered where my inner mountain calling came from, and now I know how the mountain spirit got in my soul. Over the years, people have asked me how I could move away from the beach. Let me tell you something: densely-populated tourist-thronged beaches ripe with heat and humidity hold no sway over the tranquility of mountains in the early morning when the mist is rising and a veil of silence hangs low before sunrise. The clean air, the cool temperatures, the majestic views, and the vineyards are just as pure as the ocean, without the need for flood insurance.
So I did what any good daughter channeling her inner mountain gypsy would do right after Dad died and there was a space of resetting between the final days, the death, the funeral, and the business of closing down shop.
I rented an Airbnb in Ellijay and took my soul Schnauzer, Fitz, on a dog-friendly vineyard-hopping tour. Our first stop was Engelheim (translation: angel home) Vineyards, where Fitz’s German roots inspired me to order the Riesling, and every last sip was divine.
We must keep our sense of adventure alive…..whether with wine or with travel excursions or with ice cream, as we discussed in some of Dad’s final days of his life. The nurse in the hospital had offered him only vanilla or chocolate, and my brother, sister in law and I were discussing this with Dad. You can listen here:
Engelheim Vineyards
a glass of Riesling with Fitz
perfect afternoon
My vineyard hopping buddy Fitz with a glass of Riesling at Engelheim Vineyards in Ellijay, Georgia – cheers to the German breed and the German wine!
Throughout the month of July, I’m using Dad’s stories I recorded in the final weeks of his life to share poems about things that were on his mind. I’m dedicating some of the days in July to capturing what he shared with us that was on his heart in these days – and I’m using the actual words from recorded audio, preserving the wording the way he spun it.
Today, I share his fragmented story of his aunt Claudine, one of his paternal grandmother Lena Mae’s nine children, who lost a toe making lye soap in the back yard of her Waycross, Georgia childhood home. There were three girls and six boys, all told, and my grandfather and his brother Virgil were making lye soap in a big pot in the back yard one day. They were cutting the wood to kindle the fire under the big iron pot where they made the soap, and somehow Claudine’s toe got involved. I’ve heard the story two ways: she lost it and she almost lost it. Depends on who tells the story. In Dad’s version, it was just “cut real bad.” When I called Dad’s cousin Kathy, she assured me that part of the big toe was missing because she’d seen Claudine’s foot. She also said it flew into the chicken yard and nobody ever found it.
As I listened to Dad tell his stories, the repetition of common words and phrases led me to choose the Pantoum form, since that is a form that uses repetition. He also had a notebook he kept at his bedside for writing, and it was heartbreaking to see the plummeting handwriting and broken thoughts, like jagged pieces of thick glass on the page. I’m glad that I captured so much audio during these final days so that I can revisit his voice and put the stories into words. A good friend at work, Janette Bradley, inspired me to do this, and I cannot thank her enough for her foresight.
I’ve spent some time back “home” in coastal Georgia this summer, far more than any ordinary summer, and I’m sharing stories this month about time with Dad in his final days and the stories he shared. Dad was a Baptist minister who served twice as pastor of First Baptist Church on St. Simons Island, Georgia – so my brother and I grew up there – learning to swim and ride bikes, learning to read and multiply and add, learning to crab off the pier and fish and learning to live. We lived a few other places over the years, but St. Simons came full circle as the beginning and the end of Dad’s career as a family of four.
I think what I loved most about growing up on an island wasn’t really ever about the where, but about the what and the whom~ more specifically, the what of childhood and its carefree nature. The friends, the family time, and the things we did together. It surprises me when I go back there that I ever lived and played in all that extreme heat. As a post-menopausal female now, I much prefer cooler places with drier air. While I love the beach, I’m not a fan of swimming in any ocean because Jaws came out when I was ten years old and wrecked my ability to see anything but a place where hungry sharks lurk when I look to the sea. It scared me so bad I didn’t even want to put my hands in the kitchen sink to wash dishes after that – – let alone go down to the shoreline.
My good friend Lisa Warren and I used to ride our bikes to church back in the 1970s when the world was a safer place, and I remember Dad’s sermon jokes he told from the pulpit. He told so many of them that always helped break the ice and get the sermon going. In his final days, I recorded a retelling of a favorite joke that you can hear him tell in his own voice below.
Earthworms and Moonshine
The Sunday School teacher had a mason jar of moonshine and an earthworm. He drops that earthworm in that moonshine, and it disintegrates.
Now, boys and girls, what does that teach you?
A little boy said, “If you drink moonshine, you won’t have worms.”
Today, I salute childhood summertime memories in a tricube: three stanzas of three lines each, each line having three syllables.
Today is Slice of Life Tuesday, and we’re writing to a prompt shared by Jenna Komarin: “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
That quote aptly describes the past six weeks, from the time my father took a steep nosedive the last week of May after finishing chemotherapy treatments and died of complications from Pulmonary Fibrosis on Friday, June 13. Even though there was a known certainty in the dense fog of uncertainty, the glimmer of hope in the uncertainty is what kept us all going.
Throughout the month of July, I’ll be using Dad’s stories I captured in the final weeks of his life to share poems about things that were on his mind – and I’m using the actual words from recorded audio, preserving the wording the way he spun it. I’m grateful to my friend Janette Bradley for sharing the idea to record these conversations to play again whenever I need to hear his voice.
When my brother Ken and I were there with Dad as he was rapidly deteriorating, we asked him to tell stories of family and his younger days to pass the time and keep his (and our) mind off the endless waiting and dreadful reality as things kept taking turn after turn like some sputtering single-plane engine spinning wildly out of control before the crash. It took some effort through broken breaths and the din of the oxygen machine that reminded me so much of a noisy generator, but he managed to share priceless treasures full of nuggets of wisdom from a life well lived with rich descriptions of family and friends from long ago.
In one story, he spoke an unintended haiku about his mother out of thin air. He told us, “Your grandmother said, ‘we dig our graves with our teeth,’ and she was not wrong.” I counted the syllables and captured the wisdom that he was sharing with his children ~ wisdom that his grandchildren and great grandchildren will appreciate in the coming years as they continue to remember Dad. Even when – – no, especially when – – life feels so uncertain.
Media Clip: Dad Telling About His Mother’s Sayings
Dad’s Thin Air Haiku
your grandmother said
we dig our graves with our teeth
and she was not wrong
Note: My grandmother’s quote is attributed to Thomas Moffett, a physician from the 1600s, and later to Thomas Edison, who often gets credited as the originator.
Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers at Slice of Life
My friend Margaret Simon of Louisiana is always inspiring me to try new forms. We write with several overlapping writing groups. Margaret hosts Poetry Friday and This Photo Wants to Be a Poem, organizes Spiritual Thursdays, blogs with Slice of Life, hosts and writes for EthicalELA during #VerseLove and the monthly Open Writes, and is a member of the Stafford Challenge. She has also published several books, and we presented a poetry writing workshop together in April at the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. She recently posted that the Poetry Sisters had written Raccontino poems, which are couplets of any number where the even-numbered lines end on the same rhyme and the title is expressed in the last words of the odd-numbered lines. I raise a glass to my writing friend Margaret today. You can follow her on her blog Reflections on the Teche.
Family Vacations
packing suitcases ~ memories to make experiencing life before we leave
there is no better way to spend our time than taking a trip ~ a welcome reprieve
from routine demands, a fortress built for placing importance in what we believe
things we can only learn as we travel (like setting aside our personal peeves)
savoring now, embracing family holding presence as belonging we weave
interlocking fingers: togetherness fastening futures ~ no regrets to grieve
One of Dad’s favorite books was Pat Conroy’s cookbook. I think the reason he liked it so much was that as a teller of stories, Dad found a story about food with every recipe Pat Conroy shared. This was no ordinary cookbook – – it was food for the mind and food for the body. Food with history. Food with heritage. Food to delight the senses and the curiosity. Stories were the appetizer and carried conversation into the main meal.
I thought of our family a lot over the weekend – especially as I was at BJ Reece Cider Company in Ellijay, sampling the ciders and tasted one that was perfectly flavored with mulling spices. I said to my husband, “I like this one, but only for October and November – not June or July.” At first, he’d wondered what I meant. After tasting it, he licked his lips and said, “Ah, yes. I see what you mean.” This cider was called Apple Pie and was described as the perfect sipping cider for sweater weather. They weren’t kidding.
One sip of this cider brought memories of times we gathered at Dad’s sister’s house for Thanksgiving. Mom and Aunt Ann would make us Instant Russian Tea so the cousins could all sip on something while the adults had their own special drinks that made them laugh loudly. Back in the 1970s when Tang Breakfast Drink was all the rage, Mom and Aunt Ann would make a pot of this tea and send all the cousins down to the basement to play board games on the big table while the men gathered around the television for football and the women camped out in the kitchen catching up.
Here is the recipe from my Aunt Ann Downing for Instant Russian Tea.
2 c. Tang
2 c. sugar
1/2 c. instant tea
2 pkgs. lemon Kool-Aid, unsweetened
1 t. cinnamon
1 t. ground cloves
1 t. allspice
Mix and store in air-tight container, and use 2 heaping tsp. per cup, or to taste.
Instant Russian Tea
we celebrated kid-style
clinked cups with cousins
Now that both Mom and Dad are gone, only the memories remain. I’m thankful for those ~ they are what will carry us forward to sustain us. I smiled and closed my eyes for a moment, remembering just a week ago when the cousins all came for Dad’s Celebration of Life. We clinked wine glasses this time, and we are grateful that we are still clinking.
Common Threads 