Edith Schaffer in “the Hidden Art of Homemaking” is a GEM— words to help me this past year in carving out a new place for *us* in this world. ⠀⠀⠀
“Here, wherever it is, is *your* spot. This place should be expressing something of yourself. It should be communicating something of you to your visitors, but it should also satisfy something within you. You should feel ‘at home’ here, because you have made it home with something of yourself.⠀⠀⠀⠀
“It seems to me that, whether recognized or not, there is a terrific frustration which increases in intensity and harmfulness as time goes on, when people are always daydreaming of the kind of place in which they would like to live, yet never making the place where they *do* live into anything artistically satisfying to them. [Always to dream and not to do] is to waste creativity in this very basic area, and to hinder future creativity by not allowing it to grow and develop through use. Trying out all the ideas that come to you, within the limits of your present place, money, talents, materials and so forth, will not use up everything you want to save for the future, but will rather develope and generate more ideas.”⠀~ES⠀⠀⠀
So while we dream of building a house again someday, for now we paint the walls, lay the tile, hang the shelves, screen in a porch, plant the tea + rhubarb, build a brick sidewalk, try out ideas we’ve seen here or there that we might not have the courage to do in new construction😜 ….. this feels like our playhouse where we get to try out the ideas we’re just “itchin’’” to try. 🏡⠀
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