Love this, Emily! I’m very much all about simplicity, and your thoughts here echo a lot of my convictions. Well said.

Thank you for that insight. It’s a powerful one for me. (I’m dim sometimes.)

We’ll have to exchange pics once the braces come off!

While I could go a lot further in any of those directions, right now I’m just happy to sit down, look around, and breathe, content with things in a new way.

Maybe it’s just the great soil we have here, but I find that our garden pretty much takes care of itself. We just turn on the sprinkler every other day if it hasn’t rained and occasionally pick some weeds (most of the time we can just scrape the surface with a tool to uproot the little weeds). We borrowed a tiller from our neighbors, so planting was easy. We got seedlings from our neighbors and then added some that we bought locally. Dare I say, we’ve spent less time on our garden than we have grocery shopping — which we do a lot less nowadays. And how convenient it is to walk out the back door, grab some herbs or peppers and add them to a meal! With the chicken coop finally chicken proof, we’re hoping to get two hens this week or next so we can do the same with eggs.

To me, a lot of it does have to do with minimalism. Clutter drives me crazy. My house is completely clutter-free, but I still need to work on de-cluttering my mind.