Home Keeping

Lately, I have been inspired by those wonderful ladies who are sharing their home keeping ideas and methods on internet channels. These gals love their homes and the keeping of them. I have to say, that being a creative “housewife” seems to be quite cool these days. Whoever would have thought that making shareable footage of the mundane of cooking and gardening would create such a stir. The dignity and value a mere video adds to home chores is amazing. How fun is this!

I think we’re more private than vloggers tend to be, so I have no aspirations of that.  And it is not about “keeping up with the Joneses” for me. I just think it is appropriate to say thanks to our daughters and my sisters. And to my mom.  You all make it an art. Today’s home keeping has been taken from surviving to thriving for me and I would like to thank you all.

I remember when my MIL would make angel food cake for Elv’s birthday. From scratch. I tried it back in the day and it was a complete and utter failure. I’m not good with failure, I’ll admit. I cut and ran and never tried again, for years. Till now, when the wonderful world of gluten free flours and simple directions let me through the wardrobe door. I can do it.

I’ve stepped into a new world in other ways of home keeping, too. Of course, money helps. But everything is easier with my collection of experience and failures because of being faithful to the expectation of trying again. And again. So, some of it is persistence and desire to have things nice.

We love a patio room in summer outdoors.  I’ve had goofy arrangements of whatever flower pots and tables that I could get my hands on at the moment. But we had our summer retreat one way or the other. Elv watched my helpless looking attempts and stepped up to help make it better. He liked Sunday morning coffee on the patio too, come to think of it, and knocked together a park bench of whatever scraps he could find around here. It was quite a creation of a sawn logs and angle iron that I painted white every spring until it finally started to decompose. In its day, that bench was success for our patio pleasures.

Every spring there is that putting together of whatever is available and pretty to me. Sometimes it is great. Other summers I look at what is, with less verve, thinking of next year. And isn’t that how home keeping goes. Some things work well. Other creations live for a bit and we move on to a more inspired plan.

Remember the home made laundry soap craze? We tried it, but it wasn’t nice. We got grey instead of white and the clean smell that I love went missing. Maybe it was the water, or a silly shortcut … who knows. Not my thing. I win in other ways. And I accept that. That’s another key to success, accepting what is true for ourselves.

These lemons on lace were my piece of serendipity in making home pretty this week. Such beauty calls for a picture for sharing in celebration. I really didn’t plan this. Wanting to have better fruit and veggies in the fridge this week; I took a little time in the produce aisle along with the masked shoppers in these historic times, to buy “something different” for a change. While putting the groceries away, the plan to display the fruit in a basket presented itself to my creativity on the spur of the moment,  and lo, I found lemons on lace. It “sparked joy”. So I took a picture and here you go. Be inspired. If you wish.

It is Saturday, so Elv is here all day puttering about welding creations and tractors and scoops and things. I decided to make iced tea for break time. Seeing we are almost out of boxed mint tea helped me to think of the garden tea that’s greening up. It is rich to be able to get something as basic as tea leaves from ones own garden. And I even got a kick out of the pretty color of the tea in the jar. Just little things like garden tea to make life sweet-like and ordinary.