Recovery mode

Frances, George and I are back from our Lynchburg weekend.  I absolutely love traveling to see my parents and hometown, but it feels great to be home, sleeping in our own beds, and catching up on the boring stuff (laundry, groceries, cleaning, decluttering, de-pollenating (holy cow, there’s a ridiculous amount of the yellow stuff everywhere), de-inchworming (or whatever those tiny, green worms are covering anything that isn’t moving outside), reorganizing, Goodwilling, consignment-ing, etc, etc, etc …). 

Needless to say, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed and a little blue today.  So, I thought I would post pictures of what can make me smile every single time – my mother’s house décor.

This trip I took some pictures of the living room, one of the more formal spaces but one of my absolute favorite rooms in the house.  If I haven’t said it before, I should mention that while my parents live in the same house I grew up in, the décor, furniture, paintings, pictures, floors, flowers, rugs, and pretty much everything you can see is not the same.  I have to constantly remind myself that it has taken my parents decades to collect and display all of their treasures (as it should, in my opinion) and that I could not possibly have rooms like these in our current environment.  But that is yet another reason to visit often!

I love, love, love my mother’s use of silk flowers (and I silently thank her often for giving me permission to use them in my own house).  Aren’t they incredible?

That piano is where I practiced for all of 5 minutes a week until my parents finally realized that swimming and dance were a smarter investment for their young Liberace.  Will plays it each time he visits and it is one of the many ways he won my mother’s heart over when we first started dating.

It baffles me that this is the room where I spent every Christmas morning from three-years-old until Will and I married nearly 25 years later.  It seemed so large to me then, enchanted with Christmas lights and the knowledge that Santa had indeed embarked down our small chimney to set up our gifts (and not ashes and switches – whew!).  But this is another reason I love visiting my old home—it’s a good reminder that as children, we don’t need cavernous rooms with vaulted ceilings and built-in entertainment centers to be happy.  Children don’t care how big their house is; only that it is filled with love and acceptance, something that hasn’t changed within these four walls in the three decades since we moved in.

And now I’ll apologize for my sappy ending and just say have a happy, happy Tuesday!