Dear Mike,
There is no need for you to be ashamed. Yesterday I did a lot of things around
the house, so today it's 3:30 pm now and I've been up since 7 am, and have read
most of that time, until about half an hour ago.
Last winter I decided that as I'm at home a lot in wintertime for health reasons
I might just as well make turn that time alone into an asset instead of a liability. When I changed my attitude and my interest in improving our home
greatly increased.
You wrote: "I am lazy and clumsy, I believe I will learn more from this.
You are proficient in housework." I should be proficient, since I've been taking care of our home for many years. I read fairly often about the subject
to become more efficient and also because I'm particularly interested in the concept of
Reduce
Reuse
Recycle
and use fewer chemicals
Doing that makes things interesting as it develops creativity as well as nourishes and protects the planet.
I don't like it either, that we are sold furniture and household items that in a
few years, when they are still perfectly good they are decreed to be the wrong
style and colour and the new colours never seem to go well with what we already
have. They've started it with houses now. It's been that way with cars and clothing for years! What a waste of resources and our money! I prefer to save the
money and use it for things we'll really enjoy. So I sidestep the traps and work out ways to keep things attractive and reasonabley up-to-date looking without
waste. Anyway, Baha'is are supposed to buy new home furnishings no more than
once in 19 years. I think its a sensible rule which I haven't found hard to keep. A couple of years ago we had an excellent extra long Danish Modern couch rebuilt and recovered, and it's as good as it ever was, even though we've had it almost since we were married when teak furniture was in style. :-)
You wrote: "your kitchen, living room, dining room, bedrooms should be extremelytidy, bright and colored rhythm. And maybe you are a gardener."
Well, those rooms are all in good order and colourful. Of course, there are some areas (such as the storage room, the furnace room, the shed, and one bedroom that certainly need attention, and there's a lot of spring and summer ironing to be done that I didn't do last autumn when I washed it all but didn't iron. Oh, I could go on and on! Anyway, those are the kinds of things I'm working on now. I want to get to chlosets and cupboards and after that to sort our myriads of books and make myself give some away to the Library book sale. I hate
to ever let a book go!
I'm getting older all the time, just like the rest of us, but I think that I mayfind my energies less in a few years, so I want our home to be very orderly so it can be easily maintained. Uncle Ben and I want to be able to live here for a very long time to come. If things become too hard for us to handle we'd need to
sell and move and we don't want to do that.
As for the gardening, it has gotten far out of hand. Uncle Ben isn't really interested in gardening, and he doesn't do housework. He dumps the kitchen recyclable raw vegetable peelings into the compost, does all his own laundary and makes
household repairs, mows the grass and takes care of the cars and buying gas. Of course, he also still works full time in our own business, even though he's far past the usual age of retirement. So as you see, we both do our fair share.
It's allergy season, yet now is when weeds and grasses are getting out of hand so we needed to pay for help. We really should have a regular gardener, and I hope that this will be how things turn out because our friend wants to begin a garden maintenance and design business. There are trees here to be pruned, too. Our friend managed to prune one Russian Olive tree that we knew was blocking our
next door neighbour's view of the lake, and to cut back my beloved big Douglas Fir so that it doesn't scrape against the house, and to haul all the cuttings away in his trailer.
Our second daughter says she is coming to help me with the flower beds in a weekor two as she did last year. Then we'll do some buying and planting together.
She wants a change away from all her many home-town activities and we'll enjoy our time together as we do these things. :-)) We're both looking forward to it.
You're welcome, Mike. Remember, each age and each situation has its own requirements. Maybe you don't need to be a good housekeeper right now. Maybe just being a good enough housekeeper to stay healthy is all you need right now. It depends on your situation. Some people are earnest students and can't spend much time on housekeeping. It also makes a difference when a person has children. I
don't have children around any longer to mess things up again almost as soon as I tend to them. It makes a difference! :-))
Warmly, Mary
