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:
On Chick Fil A Dogs-in-the-Drive-Thru night, we loaded up Boo Radley and Ollie and took them to get a free bandana, while supplies lasted. And supplies lasted long enough for us to get there between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. to snag two.
Boo Radley
Ollie
Well-behaved, loving Schnoodle
Behaviorally challenged Schnoodle with T-Rex tendencies
Instructions for Dogs-In-The-Drive-Thru Night
ask dogs if they “wanna go” and when
they act a fool and can’t contain themselves
put them in the car to go adventuring
be sure to put the windows down for Ollie
so he doesn’t get car sick
let them ride with ears flapping all the way
to Chick Fil A and assure the worker taking the order
that Boo is in fact an aberrant out-of-control schnoodle
and not a small T-Rex left over from the Jurassic era
then order chicken nuggets to share with the heathens for dinner
pull up and get the free bandanas that have now
managed to cost you your entire peaceful evening
along with any sanity you had before embarking on
the “adventure” for the “free” bandana along with half
your nuggets and fries then roll up the windows
and go home, muttering over and over again
we’re never doing this again……
but smile that you got the pictures of the one time
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
L-R: Eunice Jones (maternal grandmother); Miriam Haynes (mother); Ann Downing (paternal aunt); Georgia Lee Haynes (paternal grandmother) in our kitchen on Hilton Head Island, S.C., November 28, 1985
Strong women raised me, and it took a village. Before my mother died, she called her husband’s older sister and handed her the reins to be sure she’d be there for me; she knew I would need my Aunt Ann’s sage advice. Elizabeth Ann Haynes Downing, a retired educator who lives an hour north of me in Atlanta, Georgia, knew well the road I would be traveling as my brother and I would be left to navigate our Dad in her absence. Other than Mom, no other person on the face of the planet had ever done such a thing successfully, and no one has since. But Aunt Ann understood what we were up against. She, too, had tried her hand at it a time or two. I have two other wonderful aunts, but Ann has a keen insight into our family dynamics that no other aunt has lived.
My Aunt Ann has been a strong presence in my life from the beginning. Below is a picture of her holding me in the spring of 1967 when I was 9 months old, and she still “holds” me today! She shops better for me than I shop for myself and has been that aunt who would buy clothes for me and for my children and send boxes of them our way. Throughout the years, her church had an annual “gently used items” sale, and she’d get there early and shop for each of us.
Ironically, she knew both my college roommate’s mother and my husband before I ever did. When I moved to my current town in Georgia to be closer to my college roommate after my first husband and I divorced, Stacey and I discovered that her mother and my aunt went to Tift College together, and they still attend those get-togethers even today. Even more surprising, Ann recognized my husband Briar (Stacey introduced me to the man who is now my husband) as the manager of her grocery store from his younger days when he was a Kroger manager! Briar and I enjoy meeting Aunt Ann and Uncle Tom at the OK Cafe, one of Atlanta’s favorite classic diners, as often as we can get to the north side of Atlanta.
And advice. She has helped me make decisions and provided guidance as my closest relative second only to my parents. In many cases, she gave career advice that only another educator can give – – like how to get to retirement the fastest way when you know it’s time and find yourself looking for the door. I wish every girl could have an aunt as wonderful and loving – and smart – as my Aunt Ann! We keep in close contact with her children, our cousins Elizabeth and John, and my brother and husband and I enjoy getting together with them whenever we can find our way to be in the same place at the same time!
Aunt Ann and me, April 1967, Waycross, Georgia
In December 2025, we celebrated Uncle Tom’s 90th birthday, and here we are below in the kitchen of their home in Brookhaven, Georgia.
I’m so blessed by this strong woman in my life, who talks family and education and politics and religion and books and all things life with me. The good Lord sure winked on me when he gave me an aunt this loving and kind!
Aunt Ann and me, December 2025, Brookhaven, Georgia
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.
Common Threads 