These are some ways those of us who had great homemaking mothers are still dealing with lost knowledge. We have the chain, but we let it rust. We listened to lies, or were born at a point of change, or all of the above. Now we’re scrubbing that rust off and polishing those links and trying our best to connect our parts of the chain with other women’s knowledge.

Orderly, wild, intimate. Umbrellas bring these three aesthetics to mind. They’re much like home, like a little piece of home you carry with you when the weather is wetter than normal. A bit of order, a pinch of chaos, and a nestling in close. Homemaking is about our heart-ability to manage the order, chaos, and intimacy of our hearths, to tend our hearths. Its breadth of options is often overwhelming. We want to truncate it or limit it so that we can check off all the boxes and know we did a good job. But the real limits of homemaking are beyond our sight because homemaking is an attitude before it’s an action.