I'm writing this from bed.
Not in a cute, lazy-Sunday, coffee-and-a-laptop way. In a my-body-finally-filed-a-formal-complaint way. I've had shingles twice this week. Two separate breakouts, a fever, the whole miserable package. I've been going non-stop for about five months, and it turns out your nervous system keeps score even when you're too busy to check it.
So the business is running from a laptop propped on my knees, under a blanket, surrounded by cats who have correctly identified me as warm and stationary. The leads still come in. The contractors still text at seven in the morning. My body is waving a white flag and my inbox couldn't care less.
And in the middle of all of this, we moved.
Max and I are finally in the Little Rock house, which I'm genuinely thrilled about, and it also doesn't feel like mine yet. It feels like a nice house that belongs to a more organized woman who is definitely not eating crackers in bed with a fever. Every room is boxes. Nothing is where my hands expect it to be. It smells like a new place, which is just another way of saying it doesn't smell like home.
So here's where a cleaning product saved my feelings
The other day I got up, because you can only lie in bed feeling like a guest in your own house for so long, and I reached for the one thing in all the moving chaos I could find on pure instinct. My Mrs. Meyers Honeysuckle all-purpose spray.
I've used it for years. Full disclosure that will shock no one who has met me: I have strong feelings about it. Honeysuckle is the one. I know I'm the cleaning girl and I'm supposed to hand you a homemade recipe involving a mason jar and seventeen essential oils, and we'll get there, but my actual favorite comes in a bottle from the store and I won't be apologizing for it.
I started dusting. Just the living room. And the second that honeysuckle hit the air, the house finally smelled like home. My home. The one I've apparently been carrying around in a spray bottle for years without ever realizing that's what I was doing.
What I'm actually working on
Here's the honest part, because a press release would leave it out.
The real reason I've been such a mess isn't the move, or the business, or even the shingles. It's that I get myself worked up over things that turn out to be noise. Max is the one who says it to me, gently, on repeat. Most of this is noise, and you have to learn to shut it off. He's right. I go reactive when I could be objective. I treat a mildly annoying email like a house fire, and my nervous system believes me every single time. Which is more or less how I ended up here, in bed, with a fever, running a company from my phone.
That's the actual work right now. Not the counters. The noise. Learning which fires are real and which ones are just my brain doing what my brain does.
And on the days I can't fix any of it, I've learned I can at least make one room smell like home, sit back down, and let my body do the resting it's very loudly demanding.
The recipe I'm not giving you yet
I know some of you came here for a recipe, because I teased one, so I'm going to be straight with you. I don't have it yet.
What I want to build is an all-purpose spray that actually disinfects, without alcohol, that smells like my honeysuckle. Mrs. Meyers cleans beautifully, but I don't think it truly disinfects, and I'm not about to hand you something I haven't tested into the ground first. That would be deeply off brand for a woman whose entire blog is named after being painfully obsessed with getting it right.
So it's coming. I'm testing. When it works, you'll be the first to know, and it'll smell like home.
Until then, I'm going back to bed. The cats have been guarding my spot.
With love and sparkling water,
Ellyn