Tag: life

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Mahjong with our Sensei Susan

Sensei Susan, me, and friend and fellow Mahj enthusiast Christian

I’ve never played pickleball, but I’ve heard that the craze is so fast and furious that new players kidnap all their friends and drive them to the courts, taking extra clothes and gear and even letting complete strangers use whatever equipment they need to join in the game with zero awareness of any rules as they walk onto the court all bewildered. There, they hand them a paddle and explain all about the kitchen and who can go into the kitchen and who should stay out of the kitchen and a hodgepodge of rules that sound like the Charlie Brown teacher to a bunch of head-scratching people who suddenly find themselves in a surreal moment they didn’t choose, pinching their forearms and wondering how they actually got there. And then, these same clueless people now caught up in the madness are the next wave of new players grabbing all their unsuspecting non-pickleball-playing friends the next week and bringing them back for an initiation into the cult sport.

That’s a lot like Mahjong, only with far fewer physical risks of injury for the older folks who do not need additional help finding the ground and suffering injuries. My husband’s father experienced this when he played pickleball and ended up with knee surgery and months of physical therapy. But where crossword puzzles and Sudoku have been the traditional seniors’ choice for cognitive exercise to stave off the inevitable decline of functional brain cells and memory, Mahjong emerged onto the American scene like an Asian tsunami across the globe and up through the cracked-earth dust of history straight outta ancient China and settled in the homes of women who are now going broke buying tablescapes and four-layered theme tiles they store in Michael’s clear lidded candy jars in the china cabinets where their great grandmother’s heirloom dishes used to be displayed. Husbands everywhere are begging: Please, someone, make it make sense! It’s like a CrackDragon tile walked up to the New York Times puzzle page and said, “Hold my beer.”

It’s true. The latest trend in real estate in Texas is the Mahjong room, and if a home doesn’t have one, the wife tells the husband she wants to “look further” for one that does. Because, well, ….the whole group of friends must have a place to play on proper precisely-measured square tables that doesn’t involve a flashmob-style takeover of a Chicken Salad Chick on a random Tuesday at 10 a.m. There are entire YouTube video series sessions that feature how to store mats by rolling or hanging, how to read the official NMJL card, and how to choose tiles based on size to fit your racks and pushers (which are, by the way, sometimes deliberately selected not to be all “matchy-matchy” with the tiles and mat and tablecloth and lamp and dice dish).

And let’s talk about trinkets. Most often they’re tiny ducks or other little pinkytip-sized animals that are collected as trophies upon a Mahjong win that is declared valid with no opposition from the players at the table who have checked the exposed tiles against the card. These ducks are sometimes kept in a little pouch, so when your sensei who taught you to play Mahjong and lives two and a half hours away is preparing to come for an afternoon of games and will “bring her bag of ducks,” you don’t have to read that twice. You understand there is no typo there.

Even more, you understand that what seemed illogical the summer before you learned to play the game now makes perfect sense. It’s gospel, yet it can seem like learning a whole new language in two humorous Mahjong 101 and 102 lessons. It can be deep and carry life lessons, like that scene in Crazy Rich Asians. Even Julia Roberts plays, and insists that the craze is about making order out of chaos because it’s not a gambling game, and it’s not a drinking game. Folks who were complete strangers in the grocery store and bookstore and at church a few months ago suddenly become best friends. These same folks will drive hours to play away an afternoon, and they’ll bring Mahj gear and give it to you as a gift, along with their bag of ducks. They will talk strategy and explain reasons for pivots, and everyone will eat snacks and laugh all afternoon and send each other YouTube videos on game strategies, tips, and obscure rules and, of course, all the things they are putting in their Amazon cart. You’ll understand that while winning is fun, it’s just as much fun to lose because there is no losing where there is so much fun that you don’t even realize your brain is exercising and that you might not be the extreme introvert you once thought you were.

You’ll thank the good Lord you didn’t wait another day to retire, because you look forward to each day you can play with new friends, old friends, and your sister in law across the farm. And you’ll feel sorry for all those pickleball players who think they’re all that and a bag of chips. Because you know the real truth about what a kitchen is for.

Bethany, Christian, and me – photo created by Christian

Our sensei brought these flowers and basil she grew in her own garden when she isn’t mowing grass in straight lines or playing tennis or teaching Mahjong

we call her sensei

she taught us to play Mahjong

sensei turned sister

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Oblivious Circus Clown

Sometimes the most write-down-to-the-bone writing challenge comes from friends in a writing group: Let’s all write a poem about what really annoys the hell out of us, one among us says, throwing a gauntlet right at everyone’s feet. And don’t hold back. Tell everyone how you really feel. Write down to the bone, as Natalie Goldberg would urge.

I got my sass going and pulled out my pen and my notebook and let my mind go to a time I really wanted to jerk a knot in someone’s neck. It didn’t take long to feel my blood boiling in memory alone. That’s what writing does when it takes you back to the moment you need to just let something go or deal with it.

Clown with white face paint, red nose, colorful polka-dot costume and raccoon gloves performing in front of seated audience

I’ll tell you what annoys me: when someone flippantly tells another person to smile. Especially when someone doesn’t know the personal burdens people are carrying, whether the directive comes from someone at work, a stranger in public, or anyone else who crosses a personal boundary and doesn’t know the challenges others are facing. It’s the most insensitive way to treat others, and seems to be a trademark habit of those who feel especially narcissistic and entitled.

I’ve had it happen to me on multiple occasions on the heels of my father’s death when the lines of grief had set in and seemed to hold a strong presence on my brow, but never more stinging and offensive than the time right after I’d gotten the phone call from the veterinarian that there was nothing more they could do for my beloved Schnauzer Fitz, and that I needed to begin thinking of a time when I could bring him in for his final appointment. Someone who professed to be “an expert on reading body language” walked by on the way to refill a coffee cup and said, “Smile. You look like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

As a matter of fact, I did have the weight of the world on my shoulders. And in that moment, for a “professional body language reader” to be so careless with that astute observation yet offer that remark, I wasn’t sure whether to cry, scream, or slam my computer shut and run out of the room. So I decided the best approach was to feel pity for the self-proclaimed professional heartless creature seeking caffeine. To be so filled with the gift of body language literacy and so devoid of sensitivity, the caffeine was clearly not the wake-up call needed.

Here’s a thought I wanted to share with the oblivious coffee drinker: use your body language reading gift with the utmost stewardship and assume someone might actually be distressed if they’re throwing off that vibe. It does no one any good to have a gift and not use it for good. Think of it like gun ownership, because it’s similar and can be worse: you wouldn’t show up to a sharpshooter’s competition waving a gun like a drunk Otis on Andy Griffith. Use your weapon to protect, build bridges, and help heal, not to kill. I can’t imagine that my late father, in his pastor days, would have ever looked at anyone with a distressed look on their face and inhumanely told them to smile. And I don’t expect people in positions of leadership to lack the lick of sense it takes to figure out the obvious and remain oblivious. It reeks of a football coach with so much lingering head trauma that when an injured player is writing in pain, they tell the player to get up and shake it off.

This got to be such an obvious thing with this particular coffee drinker that all those who’d been flippantly told to smile began sending messages of support to each other. Imagine the day I walked by a desk in an RV dealership and saw the sign: Director of Smiles. I tried to grab it and hold it up for the picture, but it was adhered to the desk. Someone before me must have tried to steal it. Now, it has become the regular image we share when someone has been told to smile.

Director of Smiles Tanka

Director of Smiles,

the sign reads, reminding me

my natural face

is who I am, not some fake

show of my humanity

I think Leigh Elena Henderson (I adore her and her expressive eyes that can carry on a full conversation all by themselves) gets it – – check out her viral Tik Tok on HR Manifesto.

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Ambling Through Blairsville and Playing Mahjong with New Friends

One of my favorite parts of RV travel is going into small towns along the way to see what life is like there. I don’t mean it to sound like I perceive other places as somehow foreign in an Earthling versus Alien kind of way, but I like to see what everyday is like for those who live in places other than where I live. I like to see their favorite places to eat, their shops, their town squares, their Walmarts, and their libraries. I like to experience a day in the place of others whose shoes I can share for even just a day.

During a recent trip to North Georgia, we spent a little time in Blairsville. Our first stop was the county library, where we checked out the book collections and programs and also asked about where the locals like to eat. The Union County Library has a Dolly Parton display and a plant swap going on right now, and when I go to other libraries around our state, I feel sad for our small library without the resources that others have.

We got several restaurant recommendations, including Belly Pizza and Hole in the Wall. At Belly Pizza, we had a supreme pizza and ordered a large so we’d have leftovers for the next day (we are “lazy” campers who prefer microwave leftovers to cookouts). We also ordered a Catalina Wine Mixer salad, which had baby spinach, red grapes, Kalamata olives, red onion, roasted tomato, sunflower seeds, feta cheese, Catalina vineyard dressing, pepperoncini peppers, and…..ta daaaaa…. pepper drops, also known as Biquinho peppers. In all my life, I have never had these, and they were fabulously flavorful. They’re the red bulb-looking peppers in the photo below. They’re a full taste explosion, popping like a firm grape and tasting like a cross between a sweet tomato and a soft bell pepper.

We also ducked into a gelato and chocolate shop for a sweet treat. The lemon gelato was delicious with a. sugar cookie crumble topping, and the chocolates looked good, too, but we stopped at one small sweet treat and resisted the urge to splurge worse.

I also made some new friends in Blairsville, too. Debbie Lynn, a fellow blogger from Texas, shared with me recently that Mahjong groups are generally welcoming of outsiders, and so I reached out to the leader of a group that plays on Wednesdays and joined them. I’m so glad I did! It was nice to see all the lovely tablescapes and meet new friends along the way! This group charges $3 to play for the afternoon, and from their monthly earnings, they pay part of the proceeds to their clubhouse for utilities and dues, and part to a charity. When Dolly Parton died, they played the 9-2-5 Mahjong cards and sent the contributions to the Imagination Library. I’m learning a lot about how a brain-stimulating game can connect people and help organizations.

My Favorite Neighborhood

consecutive run

no jokers allowed in pairs

still, a winning line!

Whether we are at home in our own small town or off exploring in other places around our great state or nation, it’s a warm feeling to belong and feel welcome. For this week, I’m back with my own neighborhood Mahjong group, reading with my dogs nuzzled beside me, and dreading the dentist visit today at 11:00…….I love clean teeth, but I hate the scraping.

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Labor Day Camping

Camping Tanka

on our favorite

campsite at our favorite

campground, reading books,

snuggling dogs, watching movies

sipping coffee, holding hands

We’re traveling more in my retirement, but the way my husband sees it, the only way we’ll stay home as much as he likes is if he keeps working, so he’s not taking the Social Security option just yet. He knows I’d pare down what’s in the house and sell most everything and take to the open road in the Wayfarer if it were up to me. I’d take us two plates, two mugs, two spoons, two forks, and two knives. I’d pack three pairs of jeans and six t-shirts, plus two pairs of sweatpants and a thin sweatshirt for pajamas. My camo Birkenstocks, one pair of sneakers, and my trusty Ugg slippers would be in my shoe cabinet. That’s pretty much how my two prescription medications and my favorite toothbrush and I would live for six months out of the year – until all the trees have grown tall enough to give us back our woodsy cocoon we once called home before they were harvested to go off and realize their ultimate destiny as telephone poles, the poor things.

In my best estimation, we’d travel by day, stopping for groceries on our way to wherever we’d camp for two or three nights. We’d take morning hikes and go exploring with the dogs, I’d press flowers between the pages of books and sketch them for watercolor paintings and bookmarks, and then we’d build campfires to sip coffee by, read books for hours, watch movies, and listen to music. I’d have to play Mahjong with bots on the computer unless I came across a group of three players needing a fourth; otherwise, we’d play Phase 10 so I could stay perpetually confused about what to discard.

We’d stop at every festival along the way so we could check out all the jams, preserves, and pickled things they’d be selling, and we’d buy some for our morning toast, along with a dozen free-range fresh eggs. And we’d throw in some homemade soap, too, probably made with the goat milk of someone’s backyard herd. It would smell like crisp mountain air with a hint of breezy wildflowers. Then we’d opt for a caramel apple instead of a funnel cake and sit in a bentwood rocker and watch the cloggers and banjos for a while before Wayfaring along on our merry way, humming some bluegrass tunes .

For today, though, we’ll watch Secondhand Lions and Arthur the King with dogs in our laps snuggled under fleecy throws, and I’ll be reading The Year of What If by Phaedra Patrick since that’s what popped up for me on Libby. Yes, for today, we’ll only have a little pat of Kerrygold tub butter on our cinnamon raisin bagels – – none of these festival preserves that must wait for another time……

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At The Grand Ole Opry for the Tribute to Dolly Parton

Sometimes when I’m going somewhere, I pray for a parking space before I ever pull into the parking lot. Lord, show me the way to a space to park. I often quip that I must be doing something right when the Lord blesses me with a good one. And the other way around when He doesn’t.

Same is true of Thursday afternoon when I went on a mission to see if I could get tickets to the Dolly Parton tribute at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee before they all sold out. I said a prayer and got two tickets. The kennel had space to board our four-legged sons, and there were hotel rooms available right across the street from the Opry, on Music City Drive and McGavock Pike.

I‘ve done something right.

And I’ll keep right on trying.

Thank you, Lord! Amen.

This day takes me back through the years of coming to the Grand Ole Opry. My husband’s former company was based in Nashville. He came up several times a year to meet with the team and get the company truck serviced, and each time he came I’d ask to ride along so we could go to the Opry. In those days, I was working on another degree and spent quiet days in the hotel with stronger wifi and more free coffee than my rural area offered while he went to work, and then he’d swing by and pick me up for dinner before the show. Or, if I finished working or needed a break, I was close enough to tarry over to Opry Mills Mall. It’s where I bought my first pair of Birkenstocks and where my older daughter worked at The Rainforest Cafe for years. (She had just moved to Antioch when the Christmas morning bomb exploded in the building right next to where they had lived in downtown Nashville. Ironically, the bomber had lived in Antioch. I was blessed that she was safe).

This visit to the Opry hits much differently. A legend, among the greatest humans who ever lived, gained her wings last week. She knew poverty, and she knew the rags of hard life before she ever knew the riches – which is quite literally depicted in her Coat of Many Colors and its triumphant story. She worked her way up with elbow grease and talent, blessing, and an almighty Godwink. And she has done more for Literacy in this area of the United States than anyone with her Imagination Library, inspired by her father’s inability to read and write and knowing that it would take someone with a big heart and deep pockets for some of the children of Appalachia to have a fighting chance to be literate.

I was listening to some audiobook previews to help one of my book club sisters choose a Dolly Parton book for October, and all the way up my husband and I listened to Dolly Parton, Songteller, a book about the stories of Dolly’s life and how certain moments became the inspiration for her songs. My husband was behind the wheel of the car but “along for the ride” on the audiobook, as he often is about books when we travel – and he is always a good sport about it, too. But something captured him about this one. Once we’d arrived and checked in to the hotel, he asked me to turn the audiobook back on during our rest time before we went over to the Opry.

As we made our way through the lines and into the Opry, we took in all the many different ways people arrive for this event – not just in the cars, Ubers, and taxis, but also in manner of dress. Denim shorts, tank top, cowboy boots and hat. Shorts, tshirt with butterfly wings attached, and sandals. Leather skirt just south of what it needed to cover, tank top just north, and fringed vest with silver glitter knee boots and matching cowboy hat. Jeans, sneakers, and a plain t-shirt. Formal gowns of all colors, mostly pink for the evening. I started thinking that maybe the girls’ adventure book club trip after reading the Songteller should be to come to Nashville and shop for glitter boots and cowgirl hats and then come to the Opry.

The show was just as Dolly would have wanted it to be – people remembering her through story and sharing what she meant to them. And somehow, the always-eclectic mix of talent at the Opry from the legends to the newcomers was evident…..and, of course, they all had stories of Dolly. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when T. Graham Brown stepped onstage in a pink and silver sequined coat and sang Beulahland (25:12 in the Youtube link below). One who needed tissues throughout the show was the woman seated next to me. She was Dolly’s age and had grown up visiting Opryland all her life and continued the tradition when she had her own children. She’d lost her husband five years ago, and her son and his wife had flown her to the show in their small plane. She shared how they had feverishly worked to get tickets on Thursday also and how thrilled they were to get them and make the last-minute trip. There were as many stories in the crowd as there were on the stage, as there are throughout the world.

Favorite and least favorite moments from us? My husband’s least favorite moment was when Jelly Roll came out “after such a classy show, and then he had to roll out at the end and wreck it.” I didn’t have a least favorite; I loved every minute of that show. My husband’s favorite moment was all of it except Jelly Roll. I liked that Belle Frantz sang from her heart with such passion and got a standing ovation on her Opry debut (46:10 in the link below). She shared that her first album is coming out in November, and that it’s scary to release one – – particularly a gospel album – -but that she felt bold enough to do it and took her inspiration from Dolly. I was stuck by how much she reminded me of Patsy Cline.

You can watch the YouTube of the show here and discover your own favorite and least favorite moment.

Each time I see the circle, taken from the original Ryman Auditorium downtown, I get a little misty eyed at the significance and reasons that it was installed – to preserve the sacred space of the Country music greats who have all stood here. I’ve watched the 100th Anniversary a hundred times and can hear the song and the chorus of voices singing it – Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, Lord, by and by….there’s a better home awaiting in the sky, Lord, in the sky. I think of the history of Dolly Parton’s presence on that stage, and the way she could immediately connect with her audience, and the way that even in her absence, her Opry family connected with her – giving her the final performance of the evening. I think of this night of tribute and the many more that her musical family are offering, like Pink’s. And so many more ways she is being honored all across the nation and the world.

Of all the great Opry moments we have missed, I’m glad that last night was not one of them. I always leave looking forward to the next visit to The Grand Ole Opry.

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The Bean

The Bean in Eastman,

Georgia: perfect spot to write

a forthcoming book

Here’s a secret I’ve been holding back: Dad left an unfinished manuscript, and it looks like it’s going to make it to print. For years, he’d been telling folks that he was working on a book. He shared snippets here and there of the plot line and the general story, rooted in the setting of a second home he and Mom owned along the Sapelo River down in McIntosh County.

At his funeral and visitation services in June 2025, many people asked what would become of the book. My brother and I searched his computer and found a few threads of story ideas for this book, but nothing more than a few scattered breadcrumbs. And then our good family friend Nick Doster, the last person to sit with Dad before he died and who brought him the Braves cap he’s buried in, produced an outline with story notes.

More like a piece of bread than a breadcrumb. But still far short of a loaf. Then, Nick offered to work with me to finish the book….which, really, felt more like starting the book by sowing the seeds of ideas and hundreds of tiny quilt squares together to see where the patterns emerged. Like me, Nick is always reading and writing. His most recent book is a western, and he has been talking with the screenwriters about a screenplay, which has consumed a lot of his time lately. Getting to retirement has consumed a lot of mine. So for about six months now, we’ve been working here and there, chatting on weekends and plugging in August as the time we’d get together to do our first productive round of editing of the whole manuscript.

The Bean in Eastman, Georgia was the halfway point for both of us, so we picked a day and met there. We took over the coffee shop and the free wifi yesterday to chisel away a few more steps toward the finish line. We’re still far from finished, but the fun of writing is another part of retirement that makes me happy. These large chunks of time to be able to write and think and edit are a great way to spend a day.

Today? A little more editing, a search for more comfortable swivel stools with backs for the Mahjongg table, a morning walk on the treadmill before it’s too hot, and a great movie my aunt recommended on Netflix for later this afternoon: Arthur the King. I’m so glad I didn’t wait to retire – – what a blessing to have the gift of time to spend the days doing what we love!

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Time Around Tables

One of the things I’ve looked most forward to in retirement is an unhurried pace to be able to enjoy time together with family and friends with a sense of full presence and my mind not on a million other things I’ve got to get done. Since I have retired, that has happened more and more. I’m not checking the time as much. One day I even had to think about what day it was. That’s a nice feeling. It’s got me thinking about all those dementia checks they give older people by asking them what year it is. There might be better questions for that, since I think that one is a little biased against retirees. We don’t care, and we don’t want to keep up with those minor details anymore.

My husband and stepson

In the past week alone, we’ve met family members for meals and spent time around tables catching up on life and enjoying food and fellowship. We picked up a grandson and took him to Longhorn Steakhouse to talk golf, life happenings, and what he’s reading in school – The Crucible, and how the classic witch-hunt still happens. We have celebrated a birthday with my stepson two counties northwest of us and met my aunt and uncle an hour north of us for lunch because they’ve been hoping to see our RV and see how we set it up. We met my stepson at Il Porto Di Venezia in Senoia (where The Walking Dead was filmed) and found a parking lot with both a Panera and a Barnes and Noble (places to fill two appetites AND space to demonstrate setup of the RV for dry camping) to meet my aunt and uncle.

And besides all the time around tables with those we love, retirement offers the blessed gift of time to browse and pick the books I want to read next. I’ll be meeting Tayari Jones next month when she comes to a University of Georgia campus near me to talk about her latest book, Kin.

Yes, the unhurried pace is the best thing about retirement. Someone told me it would be sleep, but for me it’s the quality of the time awake that I get to enjoy in this chapter.

One of these will be my next book…..I’ll see the author in September at University of Georgia Griffin Campus for a book talk.

Retirement Offerings

time to enjoy meals,

fellowship, conversations

rooted in presence

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Chair Yogurt

Open Siggi's yogurt cup with spoon on wooden chair in kitchen

When my children were little and I attended a yoga session each week with a friend in my more flexible days, they called it my yogurt class. My grandfather, an old-school Southern Baptist preacher, believed that anyone who “does that yoga” was a devout Hindu. His son, my father, was also a Southern Baptist minister whose views were far more progressive and embracing of other people and cultures without threat that we would lose sight of our own roots.

I’m not over here spooning up yogurt in a chair, and I’m not abandoning my Christian beliefs. I can embrace the health and wellness offerings of a yogini who shows me the way to stretch and reach to improve my flexibility and mobility without jumping with both feet into another spiritual realm. I am simply a new retiree seeking new routines and ways of staying active, and as I’m regaining the time to enjoy the pleasure of morning stretching and getting my heart rate up, I’m trying to find my groove. I have already capsized my canoe once trying to do floor yoga, so after my morning mile on the treadmill, I tried chair yoga, and BAM! I feel like I’ve found a way to ease into the day with exercise that does not break my neck (or my spirit).

My older daughter recommended Yoga with Adriene on YouTube, and where I made it only halfway (11 minutes) through the floor stretching video, I made it all 17 minutes through the chair yoga video. I feel the blood pumping. Maybe it’s more mental than anything, and that’s just as fine with me if it is – – we all need that part of our health, too. But my skin feels alive, and I’m pretty sure I feel some synapses awakening in my head, re-igniting like those Fourth of July sparklers, celebrating the universe for helping them find life again from the far reaches of dusty closet corners where they’ve been forgotten for a long time. I feel the rush of energy to face the day, and I secretly hope my face will find the radiant glow so many retirees seem to find.

Here’s a 27-syllable title and poem to celebrate the day ~ one for each of my years in public education!

Namaste

I’m seeking

I’m searching

I’m stretching ~

exercise

on a quest

palms touching

elbows out

hands to heart

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Family Pictures: Water, Water, Everywhere!

Water.

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.

I miss those days of endless shrimp and crab.

Sapelo Cinquain

river

meandering

like life blood through the veins

it stays in the heart forever

calling

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Family Pictures: Eunice Catherine Sands Jones

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.

Glennville, Georgia 30427

3 In Glennville, Georgia

0 the sands of time whisper across generations ~

4 all my Sands ancestors

2 rest peacefully

7 cradled in branches of Heaven’s family tree