Where it all began: Gwendolyn feeding her brother Richard in the fifties

Home. More than a place, home reflects the people who live there, including their habits, activities, tastes, beliefs and values. Like works of art, the works involved in making home harmonious require creativity. When care is at its core, home is a safe and loving haven. Where honesty, functionality, order, and beauty exist, there is harmony. When rest and vitality find balance and each individual contributes and counts, a home is a very pleasant and supportive place for growth. But creating a harmonious home is no easy task! It demands unceasing thought, inspiration, effort, and compassion. It requires pulling together many diverse and often chaotic elements into a cohesive whole. To whatever degree this is achieved, home works.

Some of us recall walking home from school to a healthy snack and a talk about the day's events at the kitchen table with Mom, followed by an afternoon of baseball with the neighborhood kids, a nutritious supper with lively conversation, and quiet study before an early bedtime. This scenario is rare in today's busy, competitive, fast-paced society. Commutes to soccer and music lessons, academic pressure, media influence, instant gratification, conversation-less fast-food dinners, and exhausted parents (each with a demanding career) smother simplicity. Sometimes just finding one's shoes in the morning can become an ordeal! Parents struggle to maintain children's nutritious eating habits and homework time. Putting real flowers in a vase or cleaning clutter off the stairs is not a priority when stress sets the tone. Families often drag through the week living for the weekend when they can sleep in, stay up late, shop until they drop, or "Have a great weekend!" --as if there is a bottomless hole to be filled in 48 hours. This void they are trying to fill is the missing spirit of genuine home. HOME WORKS is a course created by Gwendolyn Caldwell to compassionately help anyone's home improve in every conceivable way--from decor to discipline, from meals to meaning. Gwendolyn's book, Home Works: Making Home Work will be available in Fall 2006.


Here is an excerpt from Home Works: Making Home Work:

"Whether building a snow fort with my sons in St. Louis, or surprising them by dressing up as the tooth fairy in tennis shoes and an old sequined party dress, or creating a gourmet luncheon in our Memphis home for my daughter and her friends' high school graduation, or marblizing walls and painting a vine border by hand in a home for girls in Pennsylvania, or baking brownies for an entire dorm of high school boys, painting a watercolor of someone's home, or long, long ago playing teacher to my little brother, I have loved the creativity that accompanies the joyful and challenging work of making home and I want to share what I have learned."