From the editor - May 2010

Fifteen years ago she and Dad were still in our five-bedroom childhood home, packed with the detritus of 50 years of marriage: a garage crammed with sports gear and tools; cupboards full of china; a brass collection from my father’s childhood home in England – horse brasses, kettle and warming pan.

When they moved to a low-maintenance townhouse nearby, the clean-out was methodical, spanning several months and two jumbo bins. My brothers and I were given boxes of childhood belongings to take home to our own garages. The crockery was pruned and only the best of the brass was displayed in their new lounge. For the first time in his life, Dad had time to polish it.

Then three years ago Dad died, quickly, of melanoma. After a few months, Mum decided to shift into a little apartment at the local rest home and the family gathered for another clean-out. Time was short. We told one another we needed to be ruthless. Rugs, clothes, tools, entire boxes of crockery went into a second wave of jumbo bins.

These days when I visit Mum, now in her 80s, it’s like walking into an intense distillation of our family home. The lounge suite is reduced to one rocking chair and a couch. There’s a grotto of wedding photos, one battered and beloved brass kettle.

From time to time, Mum and I talk about other treasures lost in the big clean-outs. “Remember that shaving brush that Dad wore right down to a stubble,” I’ll say. “What happened to that?” Sometimes we can remember, sometimes we can’t. Surprisingly, my mother loves these conversations – her eyes go shiny and happy – because while they are about things she has lost they are also about warmth and shared memories. They remind us both of the good home she created.

And in the end, of course, that is what matters. The best homemaking inheritance I get from my mother will not be the brass kettle or her scone-making tips or any of the rest of it… it will be the desire to create a home that makes the people in it feel good, in the same way she did.

The homemakers we feature in NZ House & Garden almost always says they’re motivated by that desire – to make a home where people feel good – and that’s what drives them to paint, renovate and create their fabulous places. I’d hazard a guess, too, that behind many of those homemakers is a mother with a similar philosophy about the importance of home.

So we have every reason to be grateful to mothers here at NZ House & Garden and this issue is laced with mother-pleasing ideas – see the list on page 8.

Here’s to my mum – and yours – this Mother’s Day.