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Family Pictures: A Kid in a Candy Store

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.

An Abecedarian Candy Case

What to choose from the candy case? Let’s see…..

Almond Joy

Baby Ruth

Charleston Chew

Dubble Bubble

Fun Dip

Gumdrops

Hershey Bars

(I loved just looking at all the choices…..)

Jellybeans

Kit Kat

Lemonheads

M&Ms

Now and Laters? Necco Wafers?

Oh Henry!

Pixie Stix

(Quite the mix, but not so hard to pick!)

Reese’s Cups

Sugar Babies

Tootsie Pops

Unicorn Pops

Victory Bars

Whoppers

Xtreme Sour Warheads

York Peppermint Patties

Zero Bar

so many choices…..but I always picked

…..the plain M&Ms

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Granny Haynes

February 1978 my brother Ken and me with Granny Haynes
Granny Haynes on the front row, far right, at Calvary Baptist Church in Gilchrist Park

My great grandmother, Lena May Haynes, is seen in the photo above on the front row of Calvary Baptist Church in Waycross, Georgia, where she raised her nine living (of ten) children after my great grandfather died at 57 of heart complications. She lived in a small cinder block house where the kitchen was the heart of the home that had just two bedrooms, as I recall. I don’t know where everyone slept, but I do know one of her girls lost a toe when one of the boys chopped it off with an ax or a hatchet while making lye soap in a big pot in the back yard.

My late father wrote a piece on her life, which I’m including below, and I took that text and created a found poem from it.

Granny Haynes

Lena May Kinsey Haynes

family and church her highest priorities

insistent on traditions

Christmas party Silver Dollars

made life fun

made us laugh, dried our tears

gathering in her home

churning ice cream

eating watermelon and fried chicken

listening to the stereo

aprons strings binding her family together

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Family Pictures

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

Ivory and ebony musician extraordinaire

Avid fisherman, fly fishing in rivers

Marksman, too : believed she was Annie Oakley

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Family Pictures

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.

Memory Lane Nonet

come walk with me down memory lane

resurrect family members

relive all the best moments

bring the past back to life

then pick up the pen

write the stories

release them

to the

world

Our Own Family, Dogs Included
Extended Family and Ancestors
Travels and Adventures
Travels and Adventures in The Great Outdoors
Celebrating Retirement
Hobbies/Sports/Art/Pastimes
Reading/Books
Gratitudes and Blessings and Family Gatherings
Christmas Travels and Family Visits
Christmases at Home

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Goodbye, May…..Hello, June!

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.

come along with me

on a journey back in time

re-framing moments

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Botanical Watercolor Masterpiece Mistake

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…..

Screenshot

…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.

Screenshot

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.

big-ass ladybug?

or one fat caterpillar?

either fixes art.

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Watercolor Haiku: Passion Flower

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.

For today, here’s a flower that represents HOPE.

It’s what we all need.

Passionate Plea

I hear you stand for

hope in everlasting life

but how ’bout today?

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Watercolor Haiku: Bird of Paradise

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.

Bird of Paradise

flying just above my reach

soaring into sky

in a simple vase ~

an understated glass jar

in an upstairs loft

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Watercolor Haiku: Water Lily

Leaves, Any kind of leaf gives me trouble, especially with edges and vein lines. This was one of the very first watercolor paintings I completed on spring break in my step-by-step paint-on-page watercolor book, the equivalent of a bicycle with training wheels. I look at this and the logo above and of course the nature lover in me remembers sitting at a picnic table on a campsite by the creek that runs to the pond full of water lilies and frogs at FDR State Park in Georgia. It seems like a lifetime ago, and here we are at the end of May. And then my eyes trail to the veins in this leaf that looks more like a molded croissant or a fortune cookie than a lily pad. Tsk-tsk.

But I can appreciate it. After looking at hundreds of watercolor paintings over the past few weeks and learning a little more of the blending techniques, I can see some growth even just in how I hold the brush now compared to two months ago. I’ve been watching my writing friend Susie Morice as she tries a new paper and is moving all to one kind of watercolor paint. My friend Glenda took a class and can paint flowers like a pro now. My friend Margaret Simon is in a class and could illustrate her next book. And my daughters are both painting again, too ~ one sent me a peach from her morning painting yesterday, and it warmed my heart…..my firstborn, born a Georgia Peach in Savannah, now living out west and painting a peach. She went to art school years ago and has given me tips and pointers as we share creations. She told me that watercolor was less forgiving than any other kind of painting, and I can feel it. She also told me that when I painted a fern on a notecard and messed up two of the leaves, I could paint a caterpillar over it. I learn so much from my children.

I wonder what she would say about a moldy croissant trying to look like a lily pad……

Watercolor Waterlily

Neverland tales of

Princess Water Lily drift

into adulthood

….or was she Tiger Lily?

I’m too old to remember

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Watercolor Fox for Silas

When my daughter saw that I was watercolor painting, she asked me to paint something for my youngest grandson, her son Silas, whose name means “man of the forest,” bringing to mind all my favorite woodland critters. Before he was born in December 2024, I made him a quilt featuring forest animals (as I have for all of the other grandchildren for their nurseries); it was his baby shower theme, his nursery theme, and will hopefully stay with him in a love of nature and animals throughout his life.

When I saw the book of woodland critters to paint, I snapped it up and started working through the pages. There were several similarly-themed books to consider, but the fox had to be cute. Every other critter can be ho-hum, but if you’ve got a cute fox, you’ve got the right watercolor book. And I think I found it. I love this little fox, looking like he is sitting in the breeze just chilling and enjoying life. This is what I wish for all of my grandchildren ~ that they will know how to appreciate each moment, love the outdoors, and be respectful of the environment for all creatures great and small.

For My Grandson

a fox for Silas

little man of the forest

clever and charming

(…..and sometime this weekend, I’ll be shopping for a new quilt theme for the newest grandson, our eighth grandchild, who is due July 4).