Journey with John Stokes

Friday, December 5, 2025

Amount to something

Can't say I been nowhere, done nothing, not amounted to anything after photographing that one leaf in the wind.

Tree climber

Tree pew

For I'm going to your house today

I know if I were young again where I'd be sitting. Do children climb trees today? Tree stands possibly, but to just climb for the sake of climbing I'm not certain.

Post

I like to enhance color in post processing...sometimes.

Other times I like to desaturate the color

Then I also like to get rid of all color

And reduce the scene to

Monochrome.

I like to redo old images

I like to do nothing to them too

I’m reminded of the old Demolay ritual we used to try and memorize, which went something like, we’ve reached this point in the east, where half our years lie before us, and half behind us, with opportunities remaining yet to do good and to be better.

Deese-Howard boat ramp

Suwannee River

Pelicans and heron

White Pelicans chilling

While the great egret looked on with what looked like disdain, the Pelicans went about their catching and herding fish.

Creation of color

The creation of color

Deep within the without

Form or void

A voice heard calling

Come forth

A creation of my own making in PicArts and PSExpress on the iPhone.

Written in tannic

Times we’d come to the slow ebbing Suwannee

and in the foam from shoals read the writing

of our lives fleeting and what was to be

thankful to Him the source of our being.

Not a winner

Make no provision

Last evening plans were set in motion, Monday we’d call in and travel to Tallahassee. We promised to tell no one, letting all keep thinking they were better off than we were, not needing our company, and we didn’t need any faux friends.

But lo, in the scan, it was determined, man’s plans are not in Gods hands, and so, I’ll see you at work on Monday, yes, you’re still better off than me, and I’ll keep the same friends closely.

Time to go

As an egret lifts

Time was running thin as it was near time to leave. The deep fog was being burnt off in pieces as sporadic light entered. Viewing the sequence on the screen of the camera, it looked promising.

It wasn’t time to go, but is it ever?

D850 with 200-500.

My longest friend

Today Roscoe and I drove over to Williston to get some seed cane from Jack Whitehurst, who came to our parsonage the day in June of 1967 when we rolled in from Kentucky, with his brother Bill and sister Harriet, to welcome us and give us some watermelons. That makes them the Williston friends I’ve known the longest. Jack, Bill and I were in the class of 1973, my sister Paula and Harriet the class of 1970. I am really stoked that he is making syrup and in the generous Whitehurst way, is offering his cane to the Trenton FFA and others to help perpetuate the art of syrup making. It was also nice to see his wife Charlene, also in our ‘73 class. 2022

A Williston girl

We moved to Williston in 1967 to the Methodist parsonage on Noble Avenue by the stately yellow brick church my father pastored for ten years. Across the street where Hardee’s is today was the two story Wilson home with a trailer park. Valerie Jones Blackburn lived in the little trailer by the road beside the service station with her tame mockingbird. She had a daughter Marguerite Davis and son Harlan. Her husband Henry died in 1958. I often visited her, for she was a painter and she would always tell me, I am praying you marry a Williston girl.

I would dismiss it for I’d run through my list of old girlfriends and most were hitched or getting hitched. We moved from Williston in 1977 to Lake City and Valerie died on April 3rd, 1978 at age 77. Her prayer I forgot. In 1986 my niece Jessica was in Shand’s hospital and her nurse was a girl from Williston my sister insisted I meet.

The day arrived and Melanie entered to check on Jessica and we met. Though I mustered courage to later ask her to go with me to fanfare and fireworks, she turned me down since she was dating a doctor. I thought, that was that.

But then, a full year later, I got this letter from Williston. It was Melanie wanting me to show her how to use her “cannon” she recently purchased. She had remembered the zoo pictures I took and taped on Jessica’s bedside wall. She had broken up with the doctor too.

I had just returned from finding a note in the bottle at St Marks wishing who found this the same happiness Bob and Carolyn White had found. The timing was beyond coincidence.

As I drove to Williston the following Saturday, I thought of Valerie and her prayer.

That prayer was answered January 8, 1988 at Whitehurst Memorial Chapel, just a Mockingbird call from Mrs Blackburn’s trailer.