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.
My youngest child, Ansley, behind the counter at the Haynes Grocery and Meats candy case in the 1990s
Throughout my life, the Haynes Grocery candy case was a treat. As a child, whenever I stayed with my dad’s parents in Waycross, Georgia where I was born, they would always walk me down to the grocery to get a piece of candy from the large oak and glass case that sat on the counter. If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see a wood and glass case that drew every child from all around for a sweet treat. Parents would have to pick up their children to let them get a good look, and sometimes they would pull out the containers for kids to get a better look, as you can see above. Ansley is carefully considering what kind she would like. I can’t remember what she chose, but I do remember my choice was almost always plain M&Ms. And I remember the joy of seeing my own daughter choosing candy from that case. (You could get an ice cold bottled Coca Cola, too, and we would put salted peanuts in ours to make it better).
The store has held wide appeal for generations, and unfortunately, though the building is still there, my cousin Lucy could not continue on with the store once her parents died, so it closed and stayed in a state of disrepair for some time. Her father, my great uncle Laverne, ran the store with his wife Lucille, who died when Lucy was a young child. Laverne was the butcher, and everyone got their meats from the Haynes Grocery and Meats. I’m not sure whether Lucy has sold the store yet, but I know everyone wanted that candy case. I also don’t know who the highest bidder was or where the candy case is today, but it sure made a lot of eyes light up in its day. Once a kid in a candy store, ALWAYS a kid in a candy store.
There are two photos of the Haynes Grocery Store below, dating way back to the early 1920s/1930s era, and the one beneath it was taken in the 1990s. I look at that photo today and remember so vividly the way there and back from my grandparents’ house: out the door of the grocery, go left. Turn left at the corner, and walk down the dirt road on Creswell Street to the last house on the left before the road intersects. And if you looped the block, Great Granny Haynes’ house was on Prescott Street. And that was how fast I could get to candy back in the summers of my youth in a dirt road railroad town in the Deep South, where to this day I still don’t know how they never had central heating and air. I can still see the curtains billowing in the moonlight, hear the fan in the window and the horn of the train as it rattled down the tracks.
And every single time, I still choose the plain M&Ms.
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.
Our host today at http://www.ethicalela.com for VerseLove is Ann Burg of New York, who inspires us to write haibun poetry. Haibun is a form that includes a prose passage to set the stage for a haiku, which immediately follows the prose. You can read her full prompt here. I reflected on a scene from Saturday morning as we ate breakfast.
The Head and The Feet
Saturday morning breakfast at the Country Kitchen on Pine Mountain we were waiting on our eggs and grits when I saw him shuffle past our table. A young and impatient mother with a crying child pitching a fit was stuck behind the elderly gentleman in in the aisle, clearly frustrated at his slow speed, in his ill-fitting sweatpants with black socks and orthopedic sandals. He veered right n the direction of the restroom and she squeezed left to her table, kid still screaming. My husband’s back was to the action as I gave the play-by-play. Notice him, I urged, when he comes back by. I thought it ironic that his orthopedic sandals looked like hiking sandals. Life can be cruel like that sometimes, but eggs arrive to scramble hard truths. I was taking a bite when my husband asked, Is that a veteran’s hat? We should buy his breakfast. And the next minute, this husband of mine – just like his mother would have done – excuses himself to walk by the man’s table to get a better look. And then I saw them talking. Why did tears fill my eyes? Why, here at this table, over eggs and bacon, coffee and grits and buttered biscuits with muscadine preserves, was I crying as I watched my husband place his hand on the shoulder of the old man and his wife as he thanked him for his service. I escaped to the gift shop to collect myself, wipe away the tears, before my husband returned with the scoop – as his mother would have done: it’s a veteran’s hat. He’s 78, was a sergeant in the Army, and he has four kids who are all currently serving in the military. His wife told me he has cancer, and when he finished chemo and his gray hair came back dark. And he always smiles. So we finished our last bites and I felt the tears welling again, excused myself to the restroom, and was almost fine until the old man walked by and place his hand on my husband’s shoulder in gesture of figuring out who’d treated them to breakfast. And I realized what we’d always said of ourselves when we walk into a place: I look down for snakes, he looks up for bees ~ and though we see things differently, we don’t miss what’s important.
Our host today is former high school English teacher, Kate Sjostrom , a teacher educator at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Writer in Residence at the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.Â
You can read Kate’s full prompt here as she inspires us to write about emotions in concrete and abstract terms.
A Wood Thrush sings while perched on a branch in a green forest.
Bryan Ripley Crandall, our host today for Day 9 of VerseLove at http://www.ethicalela.com, lives in Stratford, Connecticut, where he directs the Connecticut Writing Project and is Professor of English Education at Fairfield University. He co-hosts National Writing Project’s The Write Time.Â
He shares his process and the directions by inspiring us to write about our homes and places we’ve lived. I’m not thinking past today – I’m thinking future.
Driving through stunning mountains alongside a clear blue lake on a sunny day
If you don’t have a book club in your life, go find you one – or better yet, start one – that likes to read across a variety of genres, gather and discuss books, and be so inspired by them that there is that one little thing or two that makes you want to do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do, see, taste, or experience. People who say that books can change your life aren’t joking; my father always said that if your book isn’t changing your life, it’s time to change your book. His words were never more true than yesterday, on what was his first heavenly birthday.
That’s one of the reasons that in the Kindred Spirits Book Club, we squeeze every drop of life from every book by allowing it to take us to new places. I think back to that first book we read together in January 2025, The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend, and one of our group members noticed that one of the characters was always serving hot tea. We found a local tea room and paid them a visit one Saturday morning. One year later, we’re still going strong, seeking the full adventure that’s ours to claim as we find it between the pages.
Our last book of 2025 was The Book Club Hotel by Sarah Morgan, and one group member noticed that the chef in the book was always talking about her cookery books. It inspired us to want to take some sort of food class – a charcuterie board class, a cooking class, or some type of cake or cookie decorating class. We found the answer right in our own small town. A retired teacher created a cookie business as her next chapter and now travels the surrounding area with her own personally-designed cookie decorating kit, setting up in homes and giving groups the opportunity to create together.
L-R: Janette, me, Joy, Jennifer, Chris Tyree, and Jill (we were missing: Martina)
We called our friend Chris Tyree of Cookies by Chrissoula, and we set Friday, February 13 as our cookie decorating party, complete with a chili dinner and the fun of togetherness – in pajamas, sweats, and slippers. We laughed, we concentrated on cookie details, and commiserated over the woes of the world. If a cookie broke, we learned how to glue it back together with icing – discoveries that become metaphors for all the broken places in our own lives. Just slap some sugary sweetness in between the jagged edges and put it back together and keep going. In a world of tension and deadlines, frustrations and disappointments, we counted our blessings and considered the icing on our cookies, so to speak.
We’ve managed to avoid the germs – up until now. My husband came home with some symptoms – a headache, eye pressure, and a scratchy throat. We’re knee deep in Chick Fil A Chicken Soup for supper – and an ample supply of DayQuil and NyQuil to treat the symptoms– and we’ll call it an early-to-bed night for sure. Birthday plans (he’s turning a landmark year) for Saturday are hanging by a thread, and we’ll see how he feels tomorrow…..
and so I tell him: if he’s right about easily-treated symptoms not related to a specific sickness such as Covid, Flu A, or RSV, he’ll be up and ready for an adventure first thing Saturday morning!
I’ve never considered that a named illness could be parsed out as circumstantial symptoms, and I see this in the men in my life who refuse to slow down and acknowledge that they are sick. It brings back a few regrets with my father, who was not forthcoming about any of his medical issues that piled up (Colon Cancer, Prostate Cancer, Pulmonary Fibrosis, SVT heart condition to name four of his co-morbidities). When my aunt and uncle were visiting, they forced his hand to go to the doctor for a Covid test when he was experiencing every sign of having it. He emerged from the exam room and informed my aunt that he had “a mild case of Covid,” downplaying things as he always did and refusing to stay home and keep his distance from others. I’ve never been able to control my mouth, and that was one time I got particularly mad and popped off, “Yes, I hear those can lead to mild cases of death.”
And things between us, already agitated with my tendency to tell the truth, as he properly diagnosed me, were never the same.
Common Threads 