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Amy Scheren Founder of Simple Everyday Home, where I teach you how to declutter your house without having to thank your socks for their faithful service. (Scandalous, right?! Please don't call the decluttering police on me - they've been here three times this week already.)

My grandma raised fourteen kids in a three-bedroom house with just one bathroom (and twelve of those children were GIRLS!!!).

I’ll give you a second to recover from that sentence.

That alone would be a feat—but it barely scratches the surface of what made her remarkable.

She was tiny. Not just petite, but the kind of tiny where you worried you might snap her like a pretzel stick if you hugged too hard. I remember one time, my cousin and I talked her into stepping on a scale—and she weighed 95 pounds.

Five foot, two inches. Ninety-five pounds. Fourteen births. You do the math.

And yet, she was strong in the way only grandmas seem to be. She could open jars my own dad couldn’t budge. She grew a garden that could feed a mid-size municipality. She could quiet a fussy baby faster than Mary Poppins with an entire jar full of sugar.

And she never—not once—seemed annoyed by the noise, the chores, the chaos, or the never-ending parade of sticky grandchildren wanting something to eat.

What I remember most, though, was her smile.

She was always smiling. Not a showy, plastered-on grin—but the kind of smile that lit up her whole wrinkled face and made you feel seen. It wasn’t a smile for herself. It was for you. For whoever she was with. The kind of smile that said, I’m so excited you’re here.

She had every reason not to smile. Life was not easy—and not just because she gave birth fourteen times before widespread use of the epidural. Money was tight. Food had to stretch. Her sight dimmed as she aged. And she experienced deep losses I can’t even begin to imagine or write about.

But still… she smiled.

And it made an impression.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much of an impact that has—on kids, on husbands, on visitors, on ourselves. I don’t think she smiled because life was easy. I think she smiled because she knew what mattered.

She knew the purpose of home wasn’t perfection. It was warmth.

That doesn’t mean we’re always chipper or need to look at the world through rose colored glasses (hey, Grandma's washing machine was in a damp cellar you could only access from OUTSIDE THE HOUSE—no glasses could make that rosy). But the older I get, the more I believe the way we move through our space—grateful, annoyed, frantic, kind—affects everyone else in it.

Maybe taking care of your home isn’t really about being “on top of it all.”

Maybe it’s about creating a space where the people you love feel seen, safe, listened to, cared for, and a little less alone in the world.

And maybe that’s the kind of thing that makes all the effort seem worth it.

Cheering you on,
Amy

P.S. Grandma also wore glasses the size of two salad plates. She was so small that she had to look at the road through the hole in the steering wheel of her 1970's Oldsmobile. She was a rebel who drank buttermilk straight from a glass. And I still hope to be like her when I grow up (minus the buttermilk).

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