When I was a kid living with my parents in Massachusetts, my mom had this habit that felt slightly mysterious to me at the time, and now it feels completely logical. She saved things. Not in a chaotic, piles-in-the-corner way, but in a quiet, practical way that made our house feel prepared. Glass bottles didn’t […]
When my husband was living, he installed cabinets around our home, the kind that don’t call attention to themselves but quietly make life easier, and I think I appreciate them even more now because they keep working even when I’m tired, even when I’m distracted, even when I don’t have the energy to get organized […]
One week ago, I was doing the least dramatic thing imaginable, which was loading clothes into the washing machine, and the ceiling light just turned off. No flicker, no warning, no slow dimming like a polite goodbye. It was on, then it wasn’t, and I stood there in the half-dark with a damp towel in […]
My backyard garage was built a little over fourteen years ago, back when everything still felt new enough that you assumed it would stay easy forever, and lately I’ve been noticing how the place has started to show its age in the most practical ways. The garage still does its job, we still park the […]
For a long time, I thought baskets belonged in the utility parts of the house, the laundry room where you toss towels, the bedroom where you hide extra blankets, the corner where you collect things you don’t have time to deal with yet. I associated baskets with catching clutter, not creating order, and definitely not […]
I have a doctor’s appointment coming up, and I keep laughing about it like it’s nothing, but the truth is I’m going because I’m not completely sure what’s going on with me lately. I’ve been forgetting small things in a way that feels too frequent to ignore, and it’s the kind of forgetting that makes […]
Yesterday, I watered my little backyard garden the same way I always do, which is by dragging out the long hose, stepping over it, unkinking it, walking it back, then realizing I have somehow wrapped it around a chair leg even though I swear I was being careful. It worked, technically, but it never felt […]
This morning I walked into my second bathroom and got that familiar feeling that something is incomplete, even though the room is clean and technically done. It was not the mirror, not the towels, not the paint, it was the sink. The sink itself is perfectly fine, simple and white, the kind you stop noticing […]
