It's the old ways I love the most

I'm a practical woman who lives in a 1980’s brick slab house. There are verandahs front and back so I have places to sit outside when it's hot or cold. Those verandahs tend to make the house darker than it would be but they're been a great investment over time because they made the house more liveable. My home is not a romantic cottage, nor a minimalist modern home, it's a 1980’s brick slab house. And yet when people visit me here they tell me how warm and cosy my home is and that they feel comforted by being here. I've thought about that over the years and I'm convinced now that the style of a home isn't what appeals to people. What they love is the feeling within that home and whether it's nurturing the people who live there.

 

I’ve been busy with oranges lately - harvesting and juicing. On the weekend I made a 10 litre batch of laundry liquid, sowed some seeds and planted three native trees. I’ll put up some photos soon of the completed garden - but when I say completed, it’s the first stage of a winter garden so growth is slow. This week I cleaned a cupboards, and got through several loads of washing. Tomorrow? Probably more of the same and honestly, I love it. That rhythm of ordinary work, done over and over again, connects me to something bigger—the past and the future, and it allows me to live the way I do. It's the work that makes it possible.

Yesterday I found myself thinking: it’s the old ways I love the most. Harvesting from the garden, slow-cooked meals, baking, homemade jams, fermenting, sewing and mending. I don’t do these things because I have to - I do them because they mean something. I’ve never once been excited about using a teabag, but I love brewing tea in a pot and pouring it into cups sitting on saucers. I don’t enjoy paying top dollar for supermarket laundry liquid, but I do love opening my own bucket of the homemade stuff. Frozen microwave meals? No thanks. But food made from scratch? That’s something people want to eat. Homemade soap feels like a luxury, sleeping under a handmade quilt is unmatched and being lucky enough to wear home-knitted jumpers and cardigans gives you warmth and comfort without your skin touching synthetic fibres.

Almost all my meals now are based on what I used to eat when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s. This is my version of a pork roast - it's a pork belly cut in half then roasted in the normal way with vegetables. I use the rest of it for cold cuts.

Recently, I’ve been working in the back garden every day but I had to slow myself down because the rebuilding stage will soon come to an end and the maintenance phase will begin. So I do some work out there, then sit and decide if everything’s in the right place, for me, Gracie and the wildlife. Usually, if I look up, there’s a line of kookaburras or cockatoos in the trees watching. LOL

I made beef bone broth last week. I like drinking it during the day instead of tea.

There’s something really motivating about seeing other people working in their homes. I do that on YouTube - I search for people like me who make their lives better by the work they do in their homes. It makes me feel like we’re all part of one big working bee—even if we’re scattered across the map. We might not all be part of a traditional village, but the spirit is there. We’re doing the work, we’re sharing it while we’re keeping old skills alive. And I think that’s something worth celebrating.