Learning to Keep House, Again

A repost fom March 19, 2019

It’s funny how you forget to do things. Like baking a recipe you used to be able to make in your sleep, keeping the house organized even with your kids’ constant messes, stocking a fridge and pantry for more than a week’s worth of meals. But that’s what I’ve done. I’ve forgotten how to do these things, and I am having to find my way again like a young newlywed just learning to keep house.

Where do I begin? How do I fill you in on the last few years in one blog post? The last time I made an entry, we were beginning a new chapter in our lives at our new-old farm in Oklahoma. Now, here we are beginning anew for the third time in four years. I’m not complaining, just blown away.

Let’s catch up

We purchased our farm in the spring of 2015 with plans to renovate the 19th-century home and barns, turning the old place into the farm of our dreams. We parked our RV out front and started clearing out and cleaning up. Renovations were slow, seeing that we were mostly doing the work ourselves, only contracting out some of the bigger projects, and we were working on things as money allowed. We worked, we made friends, we enjoyed life.

In the fall of 2017, work relocated us to northeastern Kentucky! At this point, we hadn’t finished the renovation or “moved in,” but onward we must go. It was a bit exciting to go someplace new, see new places, and experience mountain life, but it was sad to leave friends and say goodbye to our dream.

We got the husband settled in a “temporary” one-bedroom furnished apartment until we could find a little farm somewhere to make our home. The kids and I joined him a few months later. In the apartment! I had dreams of finding a little cabin in the hills with an old tobacco barn out back. We searched and searched but never found a place we felt comfortable buying, living all the while in the little apartment in the heart of the historic arts district in town.

What an adjustment for our family. Town life with our free-range farm kids! We stayed there for a year until work relocated us again.

Now here we are, renting a little farmhouse in West Texas. What an adventure these last few years have been. We’ve stretched ourselves and have grown in so many ways we never would have if we’d never stepped out and left our little nest in late 2014.

So, we are living in a house for the first time in years. We have experienced RV and tiny apartment living, which was a completely new twist on homemaking for me. Where we used to buy and store food in bulk, grow, harvest, and put up our own produce, and butcher our own meat, I found myself buying a tiny amount of groceries at a time once or twice a week.

“Cleaning the house” took minutes in those small spaces. The kids’ belongings were minimal in our tight quarters, which meant less to keep organized. I did little to no baking because camper and apartment ovens leave much to be desired.

You know that saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it?” Well, I lost it.

We’ve been in this house for a couple of weeks now, and it seems I have been running around in circles so much that I catch myself from behind. Laundry, sweeping, dishes, dusting, picking up. Then there’s baking and cooking recipes that I haven’t made in so long that I’ve forgotten how. Sometimes I just stop and ask myself, “How did I do that?” It’s really weird.

But it’s all slowly coming back to me.

Home again

It’s nice to have our “stuff” back that has been in storage for years. I have to admit that much of that “stuff” found its way to the dumpster. It’s amazing how much you can actually live without. But it is really nice to end the day sitting in the living room with my husband on our comfy chairs and enjoying a cup of coffee.

As I sink back into the life of a country homemaker, I’m finding joy in the simple things I once did. It’s so nice, and we are so blessed.

We look forward to seeing where this winding road we call life will lead us next, and I hope to find more things to blog about in the future.

Blessings to you and yours, from ours.

you can view the original post from the old blog, here.

I remember when I took the photo for this post, it felt so good to have a kitchen again. Even this old, less than perfect rental kitchen. If you’re new here you may not know much of our story. As you can see from this post in 2019, life has taken us on quite the adventure. And it didn’t end in west Texas. I hope you will take a look around the blog, learn more about us, and stick around for more to come as we continue to grow and develop this space on the web.