Juanita Snyder Hughes was born in Denver, Colorado, and grew up in Whitfield County, Georgia, where she graduated from Dalton High School in 1951. She and her husband, Homer Hughes, moved with their three daughters to Woodstock, Georgia, in 1965. Homemaking, parenting, church work, civic involvement especially in historic preservation, and a mix of careers including twenty years in the public library system, allowed little time for writing. She began submitting columns to the Cherokee Tribune in 1988, and has been published weekly since 2003. In 1987 in celebration of the sesquicentennial of Woodstock’s Baptist Church, she compiled its history, “Set Apart: the Baptist Church at Woodstock, 1837-1987.” A collection of some of her Tribune columns, “But What Do I Know?”, was published in 2003. In her latest book, “Tie Me to Your Apron Strings Again,“ a memoir of her mother, readers will find stories that match their own. The author hopes to inspire others to capture and share their memories as well.
From the farms and pastures of the north Georgia mountains, where pine trees grow in the brick red clay, the tradition of storytelling is alive and well. As rustic as a barbed wire fence, as homey as a light in the window, In the Pines is a collection of stories and poems told in the voice of a vanishing people. Funny, poignant, and reminiscent of events and personalities familiar to us all, you will come away feeling that someone in the book reminds you of a person you know. This is not a book about the magnolia and cotillion south, but about the lives of Appalachian people who lived a hardscrabble life at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains. So, take a journey into the lives of the Appalachian people and listen to the characters tell their stories of joys and struggles, and everyday life in the mountains, in the pines.
When Alex's father takes her to their favorite beach she brings a dandelion with her to make a special wish, but upon arrival she sees another little girl who might need the wish much more than she does..
