I get to be here for the long haul, not just the weekend. I get to pour myself out without frantic adrenaline, dog-eat-dog, stay relevant, exhausting passion. I get to pour slowly, learn, test, and take my time as an eternal being, not a one-shot life.

Cultivating a simple and quiet life has taken a lot of mental and emotional work. Some of it has been by choice and some of it is due to God’s providence. But the delight of calm living has enthralled me. The simple life lends itself to observation and thought. It allows you to open your eyes and heart to little things.

You active, driven social women have a great gift, one that many of us envy. We’d all love to manage our homes, tangibly love our husbands, homeschool our kids, manage a business, and serve our church while having a robust social life. If you have even half of that, be thankful. Use that gift as long as you are given it within the appropriate bounds of rest, recreation, thoughtful awareness of others, and appropriate priorities.

To be effective managers we need to be aware of ourselves. We need to see what we’re good at and use that, and we need to see where we’re weak and go to work.

Being feminine requires great courage and wisdom and love. Stay in the fight, sisters. We must not allow the world to tell us motherhood is only changing diapers and thus boring, unimportant, and something we can do without. Motherhood is who and what we are down to our very bones. We must not allow the world to take true femininity away from us.

Our homes enjoy couches, lighting, house plants, and good food, but they need a center of merry durability. We HearthKeepers provided that. That is our vast work.

We still want to fill our homes with coziness, but we long to throw off winter, to feel bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. We want to stretch and laugh with delight. We don’t want heavy any more. What are some things we can do to stay cozy but take advantage of spring’s budding out?

Conversation is when we express our hopes and dreams, fears and struggles, tears and laughter to others for them to be examined, calmed, trained, or corrected. Conversation is the intimate sharing of our minds and thoughts. Conversation builds comradery, both in its silly, pointless sides and its deeper, more intense sides. Conversation builds friendships.

I’ve observed women who don’t go into widowhood, old age, or retirement with any response but to focus on themselves, as if their work is done now that they’re a widow, abandoning the next generation of women. I want to encourage women to re-forge the links between maid, matron, and crone, between grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter.

Atmosphere - an intangible yet important element of the home to cultivate. Your home has an atmosphere. It just does. With or without you noticing, all homes have a feel, a spirit, a soul.

When you start to dig deeper than simply cooking, cleaning, and laundry, homemaking has some beautiful, wonderful, intangible elements that we need to observe, harness, and tend. This is part of being a good homemaker.

Each stage interweaves with the ones around it. Maids should never be tackling marriage and babies on their own. Matrons should not refuse to share their skills and experiences with others. The link between Maids and Crones has been broken between the generations, we need to repair it. Crones must teach and train and encourage. All of us are tempted to believe the lies of our hearts and the culture. All of us, young, middle, and old must stand together, shoulder to shoulder, shield to shield, garden to garden, and hold the line on church, husbands, homes, and children.

I love our group because I try to include both the practical and the attitude sides so that we’re encouraged to love what we do. I write because writing is how I process. I would not be where I’m at in my homemaking today without the writing. It focuses my thoughts, forces me to be purposed, and has helped me see areas I still need to grow. It also gives me space to think through things and then ask all of you what you think about them. This gives me some checks and balances, helps me see struggles, and be realistic.

Winter can be harsh and hard, as many of us Texans learned early in 2021. But part of being a Proverbs 31 woman is being prepared, cheerfully prepared. Take the long dark cold of winter and make her your handmaid for planning, nesting, tending, and loving your family.

There have been several times in my life where I’ve had to give things up that were important to me for Christ’s sake — not because they were wrong, but because they weren’t best. Each time the Lord has blessed me beyond measure. Letting go of this world and trusting Him has always proven His faithfulness, but never how I expected. I expected to go at the hard work of contentment. Who in the world is going to publish someone unknown and not even looking to be published?

We’re the tenders, the warmers, the magic makers, taking our husband’s hard-earned income and turning it into scrumptious pies, painted cookies, hot punch, roast beast, garlands of greenery, strings of bright lights, stuffed stockings, and trees inside. (I love having a tree inside!) This is everyday, ordinary, deep, hobbit magic. And we are the practitioners of this art.

It’s been a long, hard year, but it has been good. It’s been a character-building year. But for the first time in my life, I feel like the Matron of my home. I feel in control and aware of my home's needs and growth and struggles. I’m so thankful to have reached this point. I’m so thankful for this constant conversation between homemakers that is challenging me to go at my work lovingly and intentionally. I’m so thankful to be a HearthKeeper.

Marriage is hard, but it is also beautiful. It is beautiful in its teamwork of men and women in a long dance of support, help, leading, following, working together, and working differently so that the whole family grows.

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.

If femininity isn’t defined strictly, what if I’m not being feminine? Welcome to freedom. Freedom is a heart matter. Freedom requires you to judge yourself and not your neighbor, and oh how we hate this. We would so much rather not judge ourselves and gleefully judge our neighbor.

Freedom says you make your home according to your husband’s leading, coupled with your gifts, sensibilities, and tastes, within the bounds of providence.