Nesting

Pearl S. Buck in her autobiography My Several Worlds wrote: "I am an inveterate homemaker, it is once my pleasure, my recreation and my handicap. ....being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking. Thus to establish again my Nanking house and garden took solid months. I am not a perfectionist, I do not like floors that cannot be walked upon or books that cannot be left about, or untouchable tables and chairs. But a strong sense of design, and a love of ordered beauty are essentials of life not only for my family, as a duty, but for myself as a background. I cannot live anyhow. In one room, if it is all I have, I am compelled as instinctively as a bee to create order and produce a home. I cannot settle myself to writing books unless I have first made this background of life as complete as I can. The necessity is a curse and a blessing, separately and together, but so it is."

Never has a woman described so to perfection what I try to explain to those who don't understand that side of me. I cannot begin to be (as in alive) in a new environment until I have created my personal nest and am capable, having been in dire finincial straits many a year, to create a home with almost nothing. The nesting instinct might seem simplistic and infantile to many but creating my Home Sweet Home wherever it may be is uppermost on my priority list. Having a full refrigerator and pantry and a garden where living things are witnesses to our aliveness, at night, lighting up the house so it looks warm, alive and inviting from the outside, baking on the weekends, and planting a new seedlings in the garden are joys unsurplantable in my sense of worth.

TOKEN: Ye Olde English Tea Cozy