Letters To My Mother - The Introduction

Introducing a series of stories about growing up in a gentler time on a beach in New Zealand. A time when I learned all the secrets to a simple, lightly lived, life. It will be a ride! Every Monday!

I know you are wondering why I have named this collection: Letters to My Mother.

In Letters to my Mother I am going to present you with a collection of stories from a simpler time. A time when I grew up on a beach in New Zealand. A time when my mother, my parents and grandparents and those before them were naturally sustainable. They did not call it environmentally sustainable. They called it thrifty. Careful. Aware. Joyful.

Almost all of what I teach on my blog and to the members of The Sustainable Home newsletter are tips and tricks and processes that I absorbed as I grew up in a huge family in New Zealand in the 60’s and 70’s. And as a young solo Mum in the 80’s and 90’s. All this stuff was natural to us. And I would love to share it with you.

In my mothers time there was no such thing as cake mixes, or smart phones, or ziplock bags, or clingfilm, or deodorant, or orange juice or acrylics or frozen dinners or roll up mattresses.

Everything had a story. Everything had an origin.

I will try to write in chronological order. So, make sure to read from the beginning. This piece of work is an exploration for me. A way to use the stories of the time to collect all that knowledge into one place.

At The Kitchen’s Garden Farm Blog (since 2011) I write about what happened on my sustainable farm yesterday. I wrote every morning. It is totally current and daily.

At The Sustainable Home (coming soon) I write a newsletter that enables a reader to take the tips and tricks I have learnt developing a sustainable homestead and learn how to apply them to their own home.

Here at Letters to my Mother I am going to document a sequence of stories that tell you how I came to know all this sustainable stuff. How I learned to live simply and gently upon this earth through all of it. It is just life. Much of it is hilarious and some is sad or educational. Glorious. And desperate. It is a life. We all have one.

You see my mother died young. She died when milk was still in glass bottles and delivered to the gate. And our vegetables and eggs came from the back yard. When we cooked from ‘scratch’ every night. Actually I did the cooking from the time I was 14 because that is when Mum became really sick and finally took to her bed.

So - sign up for a notification, I am going to tell about what happened.

Letters to my Mother will come out every Monday.

Celi