Susan-Ashton

Archive for May, 2010

It’s interesting that the concept of the “family bed” is being revived in the second millennium among young parents. Is it any coincidence that this is happening alongside multiple private quarters and the demise of the “family room”? The now defunct family room implied that family members had to reach a consensus about what to do together. It has been replaced by an open “great room,” in which family members may pursue individual pursuits. Today’s living quarters, it seems, are about accommodating different lifestyles and schedules. We build our homes for privacy and individuality, then we must invent “new” ideas like the family bed as a way to retrieve old-fashioned feelings of togetherness.
Fingerprints are another old-fashioned thing that was banished in the immaculate modern home. Our homes already have family fingerprints all over them, says author/photographer Mary Randolph Carter, whose classic American Family Style captures nostalgic lifestyles. Carter speaks of a spiritual concept that can be expressed on many levels in our homes themselves: cooking, gardening, and entertaining.
Hallways, notorious for family fingerprints, are a case in point. One young mom capitalized on this, helping her kids make hand prints all over the corridor walls, each with different colors of paint. Each year she adds a few more with their slightly larger hands or adds the hand of a toddler just joining the display. The hallway in her home has become a collage of family history.
No doubt the corridor is here to stay. Those of us who have lived in college dormitories will never forget late evenings when everybody gathered in the hail to swap gossip or to share funny stories, poetry, class research, notes, or papers. The corridor was a place to reconnect on an intimate level, the way you couldn’t connect anywhere else on campus. Doors ajar, rooms with comfy beds and chairs went begging when pajama-clad kids sat cross- legged on the floor just to hang out.

My home is just a cottage, but it’s located on an acre among ponderosa pines replete with singing birds. Blue and yellow wildflowers make their appearance in the spring. I often stop to appreciate the fact that although my house is not impressive, my eyes can roam an undomesticated landscape. Lots of critters play in the tall grass. From the office window at the back side of my home, I can see one of the smaller mountains in the Cascade range, Black Crater, snowcapped three seasons of the year. I keep on my desk the lava stones I picked up on a hike to its summit. They remind me that a view from the top—symbolizing the summits of my life—is worth the exhausting effort.
Occasionally my Pollyanna optimism about my humble residence gets deflated. I sometimes envy my close friend Abby, another single mom who lives nearby in a custom chateau with a view of the magnificent Three Sisters mountains. I know she too understands that a home is not about external realities but about the quality of perception and devotion. An attitude of passionate engagement combined with what is possible goes a long way. As much as I love dreaming over household wares from Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, I’m fully aware that a “nice warm” does not come out of a catalog or with a mountain view. It is helped along by mud-pie mentality, the kind of thinking that can create chocolaty confections from raw material at the end of the garden.

Today each family member seems to take for granted the right to a room of his or her own and a corridor by which to access it. We guard our right to personal space, free of intrusion. Many kids today have their own telephones, televisions, and personal computers in their bedrooms. The latest custom homes equip each bedroom with its own bathroom as well; master suites may have two flu bathrooms. Such homes are, in fact, lavish palaces replete with suites that make it possible to live in isolation.
With architecture facilitating independence and a demand for more space instead of sharing what we have, has the family gained or lost? is it unreasonable to expect family members to take turns in a single shower? Is it unfair to have to put up with a sibling snoring in the same room or even in the same bed? Has something gone missing?
I wonder.
Apparently I’m not the only one. The 2002 edition of Frontier House, produced by Public Broadcasting, followed three families who homesteaded 1880s style in the Montana wilderness. After living four months in a one-room cabin they built themselves, one family returned to their 5,000-square-foot home in Malibu with a dramatic realization.The mother found their California house too big, saying she never knew if anybody else was home. Her daughters complained that they were bored since returning to their affluent lifestyle. They spent most of their time at the mall since there was little else to do.The son claimed that he missed spending time with his father where he was included in the work and where he learned to hunt and fish. The father, back to his corporate job, missed the
togetherness of the family sleeping side by side in the cabin loft where there were no walls or corridors to divide them.

Corporate psychology tells us that businesses encouraging play fullness in the workplace are more productive and bottom-line effective. The principle can be applied elsewhere, not least of all in our daily routine of maintaining a home. The work goes easier with
dose of reverent play. Why not give free rein to this holy occupation? Amuse and entertain yourself within the walls of your home using what you already have to serve your family and guests.
“Bless what you do and what you have,” I tell myself. See even the scarred, chipped, and weathered things as sacred—sacred because they bear to your family the significance of repetitive use in making a house a home. What could be more ordinary or profane, for example, than the family bathroom? The one in my house needs restoration badly. I finally noticed this when the last of my children left home. No longer distracted by the comings and goings of people constantly using this room, it became obvious that something was wrong. Using a large can of joint compound, I repaired the drywall where the commode tank sprayed water with each flush. After it dried I painted the buffeted walls a buttery yellow and the ceiling a bright white, then decorated the room with a dragonfly motif. Nothing short of winning a small lottery will allow me to fix the dilapidated sink and bathtub/shower used through fifteen years of hectic bedtime and morning rituals. I dream of brand-new Kohier faucets with elegant retro designs; it takes little to envision a sparkling white tile floor to replace the bruised and beaten linoleum.

Collecting item was one of the things that I find interesting which become my leisure. But one thing that I do enjoy when I do collect for my favorite item is that I can easily shop for this on the internet. Good thing that the technology had created the internet and the computer which was the big factor that helps me enjoy collecting gold. Yes, I do collect gold and I do uses the internet to be able to find the price of gold. Not just for the reference if where can I be able to find the place to buy the gold but also the best place to buy the gold with the gold price. Which was online, I can easily shop for various items that was made from gold. Coins and even jewelries, plus there was an assurance that I can have the item on the high quality. Giving me the gold prices to complete my collection and even gave me idea that I can use the gold for the investment. Ideals item to invest than any other things that I can buy these days. I can have the gold spot and the spot gold easily.

Storytelling is medicine for the soul, and families are the guardians of community and culture. So when we spark memories for each other; even on sensitive topics, we create an environment in which healing may start.
You can inspire others by sharing the historical context of your life and your values, experiences, accumulated life wisdom, and insights. Stories also mend rifts between generations or individuals, because when you honor what was good, you find how to forgive what was bad and reconcile with your past
Read anew the biblical legacy of this tradition as recorded in Genesis 49.
Create an heirloom document for your loved ones.Whether your personal history is written or passed along orally through a video or cassette tape, your reminiscing is a vital exercise for the spirit. Writing your memoirs, particularly at a turning point, in midlife, or toward the end of a long life, will preserve the most valuable resource you can give your loved ones: the love and wisdom you brought to this world.You’ll find joy and surprise, as will others.
Get ready for the adventure, then, and let the following tips guide you in preserving your personal and family pearls.
Gather the strongest memories that lie on the surface of your experience. Listen compassionately to yourself. Jump-start your reflections by bringing to mind
• turning points and defining moments and your emotive responses;
• times you felt strong emotions, ecstasy or despair;
• what you’re concerned about or believe;
• what you’re grateful for, things you’ve learned early or late in life;
• family anecdotes, sayings, traditions, and recipes; vacation chronicles and journals from trips or birthday parties;
• what your house or hometown looked like and your favorite things about it;
• your favorite books, movies, music, clothes, and places;
• people who influenced you and how they changed you;
• what you will regret not having done if you don’t live long enough;
• hopes and dreams for loved ones.
Write or record your memories at random. Start with the most vivid things in your memory or the things that meant the most to you. Work your way to the vaguer memories and then to the very faint Just record what comes to you and don’t stress over what you don’t remember Now thread these together into a treasured work of art. Pen or type them on separate pieces of paper and compile by date, starting furthest back. Attach one to the other by metal clip rings from a stationery store just as they are.You may want to copy the pages and present a chain of them as a gift to family members for a special occasion.
Create a personal time capsule by gathering personal mementos,writing small notes recording what each item means to you, and storing them in an airtight mouse-proof box for safekeeping. Include a love letter to family members you may never meet such as great-grandchildren or grandnieces and grandnephews, telling them what you would most like them to know about you.

I remember that old-fashioned “nice warm” doesn’t cost a dime. I think back to the laughter in this tub when little pink bodies floated in iridescent foamy bliss. Who could forget the toilet overflowing during slumber parties to the hilarious shrieks of oodles of kids? Year after year the room was packed with giddy teenage girls doing one another’s makeup and hair for proms. As I scrub aging bathroom fixtures with Ajax and all the playful attitude I can muster, I amuse myself by thinking of the family legacy that makes the profane profound.
Making a house a home is limited only by boundaries of
resourcefulness and imagination, the soul of a structure. Creating a “nice warm” is what you make of what you have. It is the threshold people pass to hang a hat or a heart or a hollyhock lady.

Mom and Dad brought me home to Maple Street in a shining- with-hope postwar world. The house was my parents’ first purchase: $3,000 on a veteran’s loan. Daddy built a white picket fence all around it. He had survived D-day and the push into France. Neither crass materialism nor rock ‘n’ roll had yet appeared on the American scene. But the world was a scary place for a pudgy little girl with friy hair and a sensitive soul.
A paw print in the floor of our garage both fascinated and frightened me. Daddy teased that a black bear had ventured by and left his print when the cement was wet. In my three-year-old mind,the bear was still in the neighborhood prowling about and looking for me. Playing in our backyard was not innocent. I hung out close to the back porch or around my mothers ankles in the flower garden, an eye toward the parameters of the picket fence.
Is there a less-than-idyllic situation in your life? What can you do to confront it? What symbol would you use to speak as a testament to your courage? I never did meet the bear on Maple Street, but I’ve faced many bears” since I’ve grown up, and I found them less fearsome than I believed.
Imagined danger or not, life doesn’t always feel safe—even in the most idyllic of places and times. No escape from misfortune is guaranteed. I’ve found, half a century later that the best way to cope with that fact is to live life fully anyway. I keep an eye out for danger not in order to avoid it, but to courageously confront it

Once lived in a thatched-roof, timbered farmhouse in Denmark, close to the Baltic Sea. Surrounded by a cobbled courtyard, the outside of this house exuded charm. To enter, one
had to push open an enormously heavy, hand-carved Dutch door. This felt like entering a fairy tale, and so upon first visit I stepped across the floor of unmonitored bricks ready for adventure.
I soon found that anything spilled on those bricks would fall right between the cracks and disappear. I also discovered that the primitive, dark kitchen was a playground for an extended family of mice, some quite stout.
As was the architectural norm in homes of that era, one room led directly into another. From the tiny kitchen, one entered the dining area—large enough to seat a good-sized family and quite a few hired farmhands—and this was adjacent to the formal parlor. A steep, iron spiral staircase led upstairs where one bedroom led into another, and you had to go through the first bedroom, then the second, to get to the only bathroom. In other words, there were no ways to avoid personal quarters or render privacy.
The idea of the corridor, a centrally located hallway with bedrooms and bathrooms opening off from it, wasn’t known in Europe until the seventeenth century. Previously families lived with a more generous idea of togetherness. Often more than one family lived beneath one roof and in only one or two rooms. Just a little imagination can conjure a lot of interesting scenarios in homes of two or three hundred years ago. But guessing at how comfortably the families experienced their homes is based on our own culture in which individuality is priority. The invention of the home corridor brought to Europe not just intermediary space but expectations of independence and privacy, part of a raised standard of living.