2021: W – Mama in Photos… Where Oh Where Were These Photos Taken

2021: W – Mama in Photos…

I’m back for my sixth year (2021)… can you believe it… of participating in the yearly April A to Z challenge… and I’ve had quite a time in deciding on my “theme.” I had a few running through my head, but as I lost my mother last November, I thought I’d honor her through the many photographs I have of her… and tell the story of the photograph… as every photo has a story.

I’m fortunate that my mother had many photos of herself growing up… and I’m honoring her this year as the theme of my April A to Z… especially as was she was an April baby. Mama would have turned 91 this year… but she’s now back home celebrating this birthday with her parents and brother on the farm… where I believe she was always the happiest. The past few years my mother was fighting off dementia, while still managing to live alone until the last couple months of her life. I miss her every day… thinking of her daily and remembering all she did for me. She was the storyteller… She supplied me with my stories… and it’s because of her, that I write!

W… Where Oh Where Were These Photos taken

This photo was taken in my front yard on one of mama’s “rare” trips. She’s standing under her father’s farm bell that I brought here many, many years ago. It was given to her father, by his father… and it was said that his father had given it to him. Mama’s great grandfather’s family was from the Mecklenburg Co., N.C. area… so possibly this very “bell” traveled to Ga. On the day my husband too it off it’s post, where it had stood since the early 1940’s… my granddaddy Bryan had come to “supervise” my “yankee” husband in taking it down. Hubby asked him, do you know who put it up… granddaddy replied, “yep, I was here when the man came to put it up there… he swung it over his shoulder, and up he climbed to install.” Needless to say, hubby didn’t climb down the ladder with it swung over his shoulder.

The original pole my husband took the farm bell off… it sat on this pole in granddaddy’s yard since 1940…

And now that farm bell has a new home in Florida at my son’s. I believe those orbs circling are probably my mother checking out the new placement of her father’s farm bell. It has travelled quite a ways… supposedly from N.C. into Georgia… then Connecticut… and now Florida, where it’s finally back on Southern soil!

This photo was taken in Union Point, Georgia… just one house down from ours. There was a man who lived just across the street and he took his camera everywhere, and enjoyed taking photos… without him, we wouldn’t have nearly the many photos we do. We were his daily subjects!

Another photo of mama with granddaughter, Melissa, on a trip (1982) to visit us in CT… we took her to the beach in West Haven. She used to always say, “when I get old, I want to come and live by the beach… where I can walk with my bare feet in the sand everyday.”

Mama with her father back on the farm in Siloam… moving back after her divorce to care for him… he truly was always the love of her life! She always said, if he hadn’t been so business savvy in the way he managed the farm, that she would have had nothing. Granddaddy was very smart in running his farm… he made it work for him, and while many lost the farms they bought from the government, he worked hard to pay his off quickly. Not sure why he’s outside with his rifle… but I bet he had wanted to shoot a few quail that always seemed to land out in the fields.

Mama with granddaughter, Melissa, and great granddaughter, McKinley… this picture was taken in Social Circle, Georgia outside the gift shop of The Blue Willow restaurant. And as always, mama is decked out in her jewelry of necklace, earrings, rings and bracelets… along with her flip flops! This was mama’s first meeting with great granddaughter… who was given mama’s maiden name.

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My previous years of A to Z Challenges:

• 2016: A to Z Southern Foods and Memories… they said write what you know… and being a girl born in the South… well this was what I knew.
• 2017: A to Z Conversations with Mama… it was a somewhat easy one for me to write as I’d journaled our conversations for years… I researched favorite topics to write.
• 2018: A to Z All About Nancy Drew… this one has been my favorite topic so far, and I don’t know if I’ll ever come up with another one to equal it
• 2019: A to Z Italian Famiglia Foods and Memories… I felt it was time to finally write the favorites of my husbands family foods.
• 2020: A to Z Family Stories… writing the stories of my husband’s family.

For more A to Z of Mama in Photos… click HERE!

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