HearthKeeping and the Five Senses
Smell. Taste. See. Hear. Touch.
Our world is full of beauty that we take in through our five senses. They make everything dimensional. The wind blows. We feel it on our skin, hear it in the wind chimes, see the leaves rustle, and the grass move like the waves. We taste and smell the flavors of the wind’s travels: ocean brine, sweet honey of the flowers, smoke, and grilling meat.
It enriches our world, creates depth and delight to taste, smell, see, hear, and touch. The senses are also tools in our arsenal of care. Without them, not only does our world diminish, but so does our ability to serve and care for our homes. Our senses are part of tending our hearths.
Smell delights us with the heavenly scents of Sunday roast, baked cookies, and diffused essential oils. It allows us to turn away from the chemical smell of cigarettes and breathe deeply of natural tobaccos. It gifts us with coffee, wines, and bourbons. Smell clues us in on seasonal changes as we move from sandwiches and salads to soups and chili. It is the magic of the first cycling of the heater, your husband’s cologne, your child’s shampoo. Smell, as I’ve recently learned from Covid, is what makes cheese cheese, tea tea, and home home. Smell also tells us when food has gone bad, milk has soured, diapers need changing, showers need to be taken, air needs to be freshened, and deeper dangers abound like mold, fire, and death. Smell gives us information so we can keep our homes safe, but it does more than that. It also lets us blend spices, mix cocktails, enjoy the fresh air. We use smell to create an environment of homeness, love, comfort, and anticipation.
Taste is so wonderful. It acts hand in hand with smell. It allows us to combine elements of bitter, sweet, and salt to satisfy our palates and make rich meals for our family, friends, and strangers. Taste also has to do with textures of food, from fresh bread to tapioca pudding. Texture is important and often serves as the divide between something enjoyed and something that is just gross. Taste is our handmaid when we’re testing to see if a meal needs something more to balance it out. We all know that image of an aproned woman armed with a wooden spoon testing to see if the sauce or soup is right yet or needs more spices and simmer time. Taste can be developed and trained. It can mature and it can change. Taste. Helping us make our lives and that of our families richer, layered, deeper. We use this tool mostly in cooking and eating, though it does subtly play with smell in every aspect of our lives. As homemakers, it encourages us to take the feeding of our families seriously and to make sure our food tastes yummy.
Seeing is a big part of our lives. It is also noticing. Noticing the days are getting shorter and the light is changing in the house. Seeing is noticing if your space is calm or crazy. Seeing is noticing beauty. But it’s also noticing dust on the bookshelf, clutter on the counter, and that spot everyone dumps things in. Seeing, really noticing, is how we appreciate sunrises, flowers, and throw pillows, but it’s also how we notice wilting plants, dirty kitchens, and bathrooms needing cleaning. Seeing is a great tool in our home management. It is often our first bastion against rot, depreciation, dangers, and problems. It is also one of the first ways we experience most temporary blessings: the view out our windows, our handsome husbands, growing things, colors in fabrics, and our families’ smiles. Seeing is a tool we use in decorating, balancing the visual elements of our home, be we minimalists or maximizers or somewhere in between. Sight is how we enjoy the aesthetics of our spaces.
Hearing! What a gift! Music! Laughter! Birdsong! The pitter-patter of little feet. The strong voices of our husbands. The clink of glasses and the bubbling of a dish fresh from the oven. The fridge cycling. The creaking of an old house. Wind. Rain. Life is full of sounds. Big sounds and soft noises. Sounds layer our lives beyond just what our eyes can see. They bring richness and life to our sight in much the way smell and taste work together to make food a delight. Hearing is also a valuable tool. It helps us identify health issues. Congestion, coughing, even snoring that doesn’t sound right can clue us in on problems in our loved ones' bodies. Hearing identifies our family’s mood and wellbeing from laughter to tears to anger and even danger. Listening, really listening, is part of hearing. Conversations, both light and silly and deep and moving, require listening. Even taking in the silence early in the morning or late at night is a form of hearing. The silence allows you to take in softer, often hidden layers of noise in your home. Hearing is an important tool. It can help you become aware of issues before they become real issues, like a dripping faucet, and it fills your life with magical delight because voices, animal noise, songs, and stories are all things we hear.
Touch is such an amazing thing. We can glide our fingers over furs, leather, silk, velvet, cotton, wool, paper, and glass. We can delight in the feel of different textures, not just seeing their contrasting depths, but feeling the contrasts. Wood, rock, even rain, and wind can be felt. And not just with our fingers but our whole bodies. Our whole bodies experience the delight of touch. For our homes, this is a level of intimacy, both a familial one between parents and children, between siblings, but also a spousal one—both sexual and familiar. This close touch is a formative and important part of homemaking. Mom hugs are vital and healing. Men need hugs, lots of them. Human touch is necessary for our wellbeing. When we’re stressed, tired, sad, and struggling, being held can calm us and help us. Make sure you encourage physical touching in your home. There are also textiles. Home should feel easy on our skin, like our favorite hoodie or that pair of jeans no longer appropriate in public. The textiles—clothes, bedding, towels, blankets, even dishes—should be comfortable and enjoyable. They should be dimensional, from nubby, to fuzzy, to silky. Not as a hard and fast rule, but as enjoying God’s bounty and creating lovely atmospheres. Think about all that you touch and what you enjoy touching.
As a tool, touching is so important for cleanliness. It can detect traces of food we can’t see, reminds us to sweep the floor, and can even be used to judge our family’s health with a quick wrist across the forehead. Touch can inform us of temperature and water where it doesn’t belong. For many of these reasons and more, I love bare feet. We can learn so much about our environment by the feel under our toes.
Touch like the other senses is both a gift of delight and a tool in our box of homemaking.
Using the five senses to manage homemaking requires purposefulness and intentionality. We can’t have our head in the clouds, or be so frantic we’re rushing through life, or so discontent we just wish it all away. Noticing the five senses doesn’t require us to overturn our lives. We start small. It takes time to retrain mental habits. Start by just being thankful for temporary gifts filling this world. Once we start, worship fills our hearts. Thankfulness filling our hearts will go further in making home a delight than all the things money can buy.
To be thankful we have to intentionally notice what God has given us. Little, ordinary, temporary things to smell, taste, hear, see, and touch.
