We must guard our hearts and garden our femininity. Don’t stamp it out. Nurture it. Let’s not allow the power-dressing, power-hungry, angry, blue-haired women to tell us that being Feminine has no value. It is weaker and softer. It does flourish best with a man guiding, guarding, and protecting it. That doesn’t make it less valuable, but more!

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.