Susan-Ashton

Archive for the ‘Home living’ Category

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I was a little girl I always wonder why my mother like collecting Rugs. She used to collect Area rugs before we transfer to a new house. I remember the Cheap Rugs she put in our receiving area. The Rugs looks simple before mother lay it on the floor. But when she put it on the floor my sister and i were amazed because it fits the floor tile.

Since then mother always bought rugs whenever she went to department store. She spare a time to look for a new rugs that she can put in our house, and in the rooms. When the department store is on sale there are times she only bought rugs. She is not like the other mother who is beauty conscious. Or like those who enjoy buying clothes for themselves and for her family. There are mother who love being with fashion they say that even they are a busy mother they make it a point not to look old or not in fashion.

But my mother is different from the other mother that I usually see. She relieve her stress and tiredness from the household chores by collecting rugs, laying it on the floor, cleaning the rugs. She clean the rugs all by herself and make sure that it was clean properly. She make sure that the rugs are all dust free and stain free. One time she let me clean the rugs but I didn’t pass to her standard. She told me to keep brushing it and see if all of the dirt are all gone. i told her if why don’t we just vacuum it. She said she prefer brushing it and cleaning it using her bare hands. Because she can be sure that the rugs are really clean and dust free.