Marmee is coming.

Have you ever watched that YouTube video, “Company’s Coming”, where the guy is frantically running around the house trying to make everything ready for company?

I have. Probably two dozen times since 2016, and it still makes me laugh. The reason it’s so funny is because everybody knows they, too, have acted so ridiculously.

This afternoon I’ve been puttering around, arranging my canning shelf, wiping counters, putting little things here and there, making sure our home doesn’t look too tidy, but not like I’m shirking my homemaking duties, either. The blankets on the chair have to be tossed just so. The basket of onions on the counter must be full, but not heaping, not as though I just filled it up. The jars of canned peaches on the bottom shelf must be restocked, because we can’t have anybody thinking I only have three left. (That would be poor planning. What kind of woman would I be?)

And I am laughing at myself all the while, because I know that I’m being ridiculous. And it is only my mom who is coming!

(Not *only* my mom. She is very important, of course, but she is also an enormously forgiving person about things like un-fluffed pillows and crumbly counters.)

My mom is coming to Ohio for a few days to help me out during and after a surgery I will have tomorrow. One day I will share the full story on that, or at least more of it, when things are said and done. Marmee is coming, and I am hoping my house will be welcoming. I am hoping she is proud of my food storage. (This is oddly a big deal for me.) I am hoping she likes what I make for dinner. Hoping, but of course I have very little trepidation over any of these things, because again — it’s Marmee. And she is the one who taught me to keep a home in the first place, after all.

My parents’ home is one of the most warm and welcoming places I have ever been. When I was in college and I came home on weekends it felt like being enveloped in a big hug. Their house is not a big house. It’s a little house, full of cozy furniture, some new and some passed-down, earthy and rustic decor pieces, but not the perfect white farmhouse-type decor. I did not inherit a sparkling clean, white-finish style from my mom. I am pleased to say I got all her outdoorsy, functional, chipped-paint, antique furniture, pinecone-y vibes.

I think I also have taken after her cooking style, which is full-on comfort food. And I’m talking about meat and potatoes, in a nutshell. Whole foods prepared simply that taste so good.

The other neat thing about my mom’s style is that it does change. When I was growing up our house did not have a bunch of house plants, but now my mom keeps a whole flock of them towering in a sunny window. She’ll get ideas from magazines, which we do tease her about, but there’s not one thing wrong with that. And then she goes to the hardware store, orders some paint, or pots a new plant, and transforms the plain into pretty, little by little.

Most important in her house, though, are people. I have lived there, and so have my sisters, and some others besides. The floors can temporarily get dirty and it’s not a crisis if there are dishes in a pile by the sink for a time, as long as everyone is fed, comfortable, and happy.

I love the practicality and hominess of my mom’s house and the way her demeanor reflects that. It is a privilege indeed to now be so old and married and able to have her in our home, at our dinner table. I can’t help wondering, putting on the tablecloth and pulling out vegetables for our supper, what will she think, and will she be proud of me? Because that feels really good.

Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones. – Proverbs 16:24