I remember buying a new pair of white Keds as a young adult and someone saying, “they’re so blinding white, you might wanna kick some dirt on ’em.” That has stuck with me every time I see a pair of new white shoes, not yet traveled or broken in. And as a lover of well-worn shoes, this photo shared with me by my daughter-in-law sparked joy when I saw the love of living in one of my granddaughter’s shoes as she was fishing on the muddy brink of a pond.
In 1971, we lived in Reynolds, Georgia on Robin Hood Road and the corner of Friar Tuck. Mom was pregnant with my baby brother, Ken, and Dad was pastor of the First Baptist Church. We lived here in the pastorium, and those were days filled with such fun of childhood – it’s where I learned to ride a bike without training wheels. I’m still looking for pictures of my favorite Keds sneakers – Red White, and Blue. Those were my favorite colors in those days, and I can see it in the campground pictures where we camped over the Fourth of July holiday. Mom always proved that she could outfish anyone, even times when she went fly fishing.
I’m still sifting through old photographs as I digitize them and share them with other family members. It’s fun walking down memory lane.
Our house in Reynolds, Georgia at the corner of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck Roads
Mom, Fernandina Beach, Florida in 1971, pregnant with my brother Ken
Happy 250th Birthday, America! It’s a great day for watermelon, and a great day to be born. My son, his wife, and their children await the birth of a son and baby brother. Whatever we do today, it’s day to celebrate.
Summer in Blackshear, Georgia, 1969 at my grandparents’ house
My mom’s mother worked in downtown Waycross, Georgia in the Sears and Roebuck Catalog Department. She took sales orders over the phone, and if my mother didn’t make the clothes I was wearing on her machine, it was practically guaranteed to have a Winnie the Pooh in the waist tag or on the left front chest. We got 20% off on everything – – at least, my grandmother did and so by default my mother did. When I think back on my childhood, this was my standard weekday garb. Shorts or knit slacks and a Winnie the Pooh shirt. The world had not yet thought of Velcro and light-up shoes, and honestly I think I am happy about that. At least I learned to tie my shoes early. Red Keds for the win! These were the days when dressing was so much easier – – this piece, that piece, shoes, and all the better if it actually matched. Oh, if we could just return to those days and clothes could fit as well as they used to. And if only the 100 Acre Wood were still a place as real as it once was.
L-R: Kitty (my grandmother’s good friend), me, Earl (my grandfather), Eunice (grandmother), and my mother, Miriam
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.
It’s kind of a rite of passage, that childhood pilgrimage to Orlando, Florida to see the castle and the mouse. Somewhere between 1974 when my parents took my brother and me and the late 1990s when I took my own children, the place got crowded – really, too crowded to enjoy. But there is this unspoken rule about taking the kids to Disney World, and so we packed them up and took them, checked the box and came home. The best memories from the 1970s trip were the A-Frame cabins we stayed in, Wilderness style, with one other family. The best memories from the 1990s trip were the night swims in the Wilderness Lodge pool. The memory of the mouse with my own children? Vague, except for the long line to get a picture.
Disney Downer Haiku
Okay, I confess:
Yeah, I’m a Disney downer.
Me?? Resounding meh.
Dad holding Ken, and me in Mickey Shirt, plus our friends, 1974
Mallory, Ansley, and Marshall with the mouse- 1997
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…..
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…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.
Here we are : the last day of the whole school year. Students graduated a week ago, and teachers leave mid-day today for the summer. Those of us at Central Office watch them wave, disguising our bit of green envy as they head out on cruises and vacations to mountains, beaches, and swimming pools. I’m holding on tight for the summer ride, just trying to get through mid-June and then two weeks at the end of July.
For over a week, we’ve been working on planning a work retreat that seems ever-evolving and unfinished, and I don’t know how things will go. When I looked back at Spring Break and thought back to those early attempts at watercolor painting sitting at that picnic table, just focusing on one petal at a time., I realized that this is good advice for any day. One petal at a time. I thought of the hope of the passion flower. I’m claiming it today as teachers leave for summer and we are left to carry on with work. And each day is one day closer to retirement.
When I first bought my watercolor book of step-by-step directions on a side-by-side guide, I thumbed through the pages and wondered why they had chosen such obscure flowers. There wasn’t a rose or a daisy anywhere, yet there was a cactus and sea holly. And this bird of paradise.
And then, as I started working through the book, I realized that each painting teaches a different technique. The cactus and sea holly teach tiny little lines that look like thistle needles. The cactus pot teaches shadows in gradient colors. This bird of paradise, while I don’t love it, teaches the effects of wet-on-wet painting and how colors blend when water is used to move the paint around in an area.
I think the teacher in me needed the instructional framework spelled out, starting with the learning target, including an objective, and success criteria in little boxes to check if I accomplished it all. This is one of those examples that shows that process is more important than product – because the blending of color here in a first attempt carries into other flowers that have blending involved.
I don’t like this painting at all. But I appreciate it, because it gave me practice to be able to blend color in a hydrangea that I do like. And this is how watercolor painting is teaching me that life is like that, too. We learn skills in small attempts that transfer into other areas. Take the Karate Kid, for example. He learned Wax On/Wax Off and Sand the Floor and thought he was being used as a free worker. All along, he was preparing for that fight at the end of the movie that helped him put that blond-headed bully in an agonizing face plant down on the mat.
Looking back at the new learning gives me the reassurance that old dogs CAN learn new tricks. And even better: they can teach themselves if they can read and follow directions.
