C-O-D-E-R-E-D

Archive for the ‘home’ Category

Without our realizing it, things drift into shabbiness, or at least cease to look their best. Look around. Are there areas in your house that need upgrading so that they contribute to a more gracious way of life?
Consider whether you would be more enthusiastic about your house if you simply spruced up your
Flatware. Are you using bits and pieces of sets in a myriad of styles? Buy a new matching set and enjoy the benefits of being proud of how your table looks. Over the years pieces get nicked in the electric disposal, become dulled with use, and look generally dingy Certainly, if you are going to entertain, you will do so more happily with a presentable table.
I’d been shopping for a new set of flatware for a while, and I stumbled upon a set at a discount store for a good price. I said, “Enough with using junk flatware!” and snapped it up. I don’t know of any purchase I have enjoyed using quite so much. I hadn’t realized how ready for retirement
old set was, until I employed the new one.
Shoe area. Are your shoes lying around in a jumbled pile, kicking at each other in the bottom of your closet? You’ll feel better about the entire area if you buy a shoe holder and vacuum the bottom of your
is very important, get rid of shoes you don’t wear. Can’t stand throwing them out? Move them into the lives of other people who can happily wear them, while you happily stop storing them. Or throw them away. It’s okay. Really. I promise.

The Rooms like the dining room become a home office? Has the guest room become a storage room? With thought, you may be able to reclaim them for their original purpose, so you can enjoy them more.
You can do some flower arrangements and plants. Are your artificial ones dusty and droopy? Clean them with an air blower or silk flower-cleaning spray. Are your live plants straggly? Depot them or replace them. In the beautiful rooms of decoration magazines, flowers and plants play an important part in making the room come alive. If you imagine those pictures without plants, you will notice the rooms lose a lot of sparkle.

I have to admit, my landscape is not well defined but definitely what experts call “low-envy” I wish I could have tall stalks of hollyhocks frolicking alongside fences, aroma-rich sweet peas, and stately sunflowers nodding in the breeze. Instead, a scraggly juniper tree bears tiny pale blue berries in the fall. Miniature fir trees sit primly in Terra-cot ta-turned-white pots. The trees are disheveled odd shapes. My backyard blueprint does not involve innovative ideas or exquisitely detailed plans. Visual accents of the artificial kind are not my cup of tea. I am shaping a context for a personal experience in the wild, adopting Thoreau’s philosophy, for I also believe that “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” or at least the preservation of my particular soul.

Taking this one step further John O’ Donohue, author of Annam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World, says, “The landscape has a huge influence on shaping the rhythm of mind and perception. Celtic spirituality had a recognition of nature as the theater of divine presence … [it was] where divine presence articulated its imagination.”
In landscape, and in shaping the landscape of our homes or our lives, we have opportunity to express ourselves as made in God’s image, to articulate our imagination. There seems to be no limit to the gardens we may create: container gardens, rock gardens, kitchen gardens, children’s fairy gardens, shade gardens, organic gardens, and so on. Whatever we call it, a well-defined landscape can feed the soul as surely as it can add curb appeal—and, my Realtor tells me, 15 percent to the selling price of a home.

Artful attention and arrangement on the grounds of your home, the balcony of your apartment, or the window box outside your rented room can make your space a mini Eden. You may go for the opulent, the exotic, and the tamed, or you may follow a wiser path to paradise. Using plants appropriate for your climate,
you may go low maintenance. But that needn’t mean boring or plain. When you imitate the natural landscape on your grounds, you’re going for the greater aesthetic.
Celts of the fifth century brought their love of nature and their awareness of the sacred into Christianity when they converted, says Bob Abernathy. They were fierce warriors who lived simple lives and valued the hushed, brooding landscape.2

It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. My first grade friend Mattie Mae was a happy kid who wore her hair in short braids all over her head, fastened with colorful plastic barrettes. She lived on the other side of the tracks in my small hometown. I discovered this the day I went to her house to play after school. Mattie Mae’s prairie- type sod house was buried in the ground like a hobbit’s habitat, all covered with grass. Its threshold, however, stood upright in a mound of rounded earth, looking nonsensical and inventive. The door opened to a stairway leading down into a dark room with a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Apart from this, the brightest thing in the underground room was the smile on the face of Mattie Mae’s mother, waiting with cookies and milk.
Before visiting Mattie Mae, I’d seen underground storm shelters on my cousins’ farms. These were primitive dugouts covered with a wooden door that lay flush with the ground. In the earlier part of the last century, you had to lift the heavy door of a shelter straight up to slip in under it, and you had to be careful not to squish your fingers when it soundly slammed down. I ventured into a shelter in a game of hide-and-seek. Peeking out through cracks in the wooden door, I shivered from the damp chill of the cave below and the excitement of concealment.