GOOD MORNING, FRIENDS

A REMEMBERAMBLE, NOVEMBER 22, 2025

Happy Saturday morning, my friends. It is good to see you again. I believe we are in for some rain today, and it will be welcome if it comes. We had cooler weather and little to no rain around here of late.

It has warmed up and that is often a harbinger of rain. Likewise after a rain this time of year, we almost always have much cooler weather clinging to its coattail.

Many of us have a natural and deeply abiding love for this land, and by that, I mean the very soil of our region, and particular our sand ridges. The ancient sand dunes, or sand ridges as we say, are unique to are region.

There are other places that have sand ridges, but the Ohoopee River, the Canoochee River, Fifteen Mile Creek, and others in Emanuel County, extending well into Tattnall County.

These are some of the best examples of ancient sand dunes and ridges that extend for more than fifty miles. These dunes were deposited along the east side of these streams.

Thousands of years ago when the area became dry and arid, powerful winds to deposit the dunes. These were amazing habitats, and ecosystems evolved to take natural advantage of those sand ridges.

They were populated with old longleaf and slash pines and scrub oaks that grew old but remained small because they were in deep sand with reduced water resources.

Prickly pear cactuses, and other dry tolerant plants proliferated, and some were to be found nowhere else. Gopher tortoises, rattlesnakes, rainbow snakes, fox squirrels and a myriad of other more or less common critters called the sand ridges home.

There are many places where one might go to see spectacular displays of colors in the autumn, with hardwood trees being quite showy, in reds, yellows, oranges, burgundy, scarlet, and various shades and tones as to be magnificent at their peak.

Pictured here is my dear-sweet Granny, Georgia Florrice Townsend Morris, of whom I will speak of in a moment.

However, there are two kinds of trees that put on an ancient display of color more subtle than the showy ones that are ogled over in the fall. I am referring to our sand ridge scrub oaks, that all become rusty red.

The other is our native cypresses that often stand in the wet drains that border some dunes. They too take on a brown-red color to match their cousins, the scrub oaks.

Cypresses of Georgia's autumn

My dear sweet Granny would sometimes ask me to drive her out along US 80, west of Swainsboro to see the scrub oaks of the Hoopee dunes. You may ask why, and I will tell you.

To her and me, and for others too, those rusted-looking oaks and cypresses say "home," to those who grew up loving them. She loved them as a child, and that love never left her.

I took this photograph of them yesterday, in the very same spot we always visited.

They will always be special to me. They are very old, but as I said, growing in such deep sand stunts them, dictating that they remain dwarf trees for all time.

I enjoyed writing this, as I almost always do, but I changed the format a bit. Let me know if you like this with two columns with photos interspersed, please. May God richly bless you my brethren.

..... NUMBERS 6: 24-26, KJV

..... we boyz three, babee conway, lil merle, & me