(Me as My Mother, painted quite badly by me)
As the new year came and went, I rolled around lots of ideas in my head for resolutions: heaven knows there's room for improvement in pretty much every corner of my life(!). I looked back through some of my lists from previous years and after seeing so many repeats I decided to throw the whole idea out the window - at least for this year - and instead focus on a concept. What I've come to is a desire for more wholesome-ness in my life. I think it has a really broad application... from the way I prepare food for my family (I think wholesome connotes a lot more tastiness than healthy, don't you?), to the choices I make about how I spend my spare time, to the quality of the atmosphere that I foster in our home.
As I do with so many things in my adult life, I come back to the excellent example of my own mother. Sorry, mom, not to put you on a pedestal, but you are, in my mind, the queen of wholesome living. Always with a classic tucked in your bag for a spare moment, grinding wheat for really good homemade bread, dragging us to museums at every opportunity, gardening madly away in your Laura Ashley jumpers, patiently dealing with the fighting of four daughters, and - most powerfully - the underpinning of everything else I've listed, living your personal values of wholesomeness and virtue consistently and gracefully. The times I've met Melissa's mom, Beth, I've been struck with the same impression of her (is it that midwestern mountain-girl thing?).
So, 2010, this will be a good year. No, we probably won't move to a farm, and no, I will probably not start to raise chickens, and definitely no, I will not EVER learn to play the last page of Claire de Lune (started that goal my senior year of high school). But I think I can strive for more wholesomeness.
