In This Year’s Home and Garden Guide
Such energy is all around us! The miracle of humus, light, water and sap that brings Earth back to life each spring Mother Nature achieves apparently effortlessly. She’s so good at her job that our own inspiration rises in wonder at her seasonal restoration. With Earth looking so good, I find myself saying, what about my own home and garden?
Whether we live on green acres or way up in a high rise, whether our space is sprawling or tiny, we can follow Nature’s lead. For the size and scope of our spring projects matter less than the energy they release in our human beings. As Mother Nature’s children, we’re driven like all the rest of Earth’s creatures to renewal.
Spring renewal brought crisp white linen slipcovers to the overstuffed chairs and couches of the most welcoming home I’ve ever visited, the Lewis family home in the haphazard village of Gillespie, Illinois. Florence, who ran the home, had an eye for perfection. Each object, each seasonal change, was a comforting act of invisible artistry. Those slipcovers, for example, were sewn by Florence and her mother-in-law, who had owned the house before her. Years later, they still stand as my talisman of domestic comfort. I’ve never dared such an invitation to soils and spills, though over time it’s occurred to me that the parlor they adorned was less used than the family room-library.
My indoors ritual of spring renewal is to attack the windows. Washing, opening and hanging light curtains changes the home season. It’s my symbolic first step into spring, and I feel obliged to start with the equinox. Thereafter everything else, indoor and out, unfolds slowly as I find time, energy and money.
The physical acts of remaking our home and garden is part of the reward — until it becomes a burden. So this Home & Garden Guide helps me scale my plans to my abilities and discover to whom to turn to carry out the dreams I can’t manage.
I hope it will do the same for you, becoming your directory to the greater Chesapeake Country village where you do your spring renewal shopping.
All the businesses you’ll read about here are advertisers who pay for the paper in your hand. Their investment in Bay Weekly, ours in you and yours in them: That partnership keeps us all in business. That continuity keeps our community culturally and economically strong. A strong community enriches our personal lives and supports our choices. That’s true all the way into our homes and gardens.
This year’s Home and Garden Guide introduces three-dozen businesses to help you keep up with Mother Nature.
From a bank, Realtor and insurer to support your biggest decisions … to who can build the projects you imagine … to call to tune up your heating and cooling system … to who’ll wash even your highest windows … to where to find art to open your horizons: You’ll find all these and more home improvers in these pages.
Outdoors, we take you from nurseries to landscapers to lawn services to experts in outdoors living who can dig you a pool, keep your pool fresh and healthy and equip you well, from extravagant grills to outdoor kitchens.
For what to prepare in those kitchens we take you to farms, farm markets and orchards where you can have a good time with the free time you’ve saved as well as find bounty to bring home.
In our pages, you’ll read what each says they do best. When one strikes a chord, you can turn from our pages to that website to continue your research. After that, you might find that the project you dream of is only a phone call or visit away.
We see great returns from this issue.
Sandra Olivetti Martin
Editor and publisher; [email protected]