Life, Love and Vintage Housekeeping

Alison May created BrocanteHome on a cold November afternoon, eight years ago, when her little boy was just one year old and the home she had created with his Daddy was an oasis of domestic bliss she wanted to share with the world, never imagining, even for a moment, that eventually her little website would become the mainstay of her life, her means to financial support, an emotional prop she can now barely live without, and the link between herself and thousands of like-minded women from across the globe, happy to call themselves Vintage Housekeepers.

A lot has changed in eight years and blogging has been an astonishing way of documenting the unforeseen. When Finley was two and a half, his Daddy left Alison for another woman and life as she knew it was turned on its lavender scented head.
Where once there were routines and rituals she practiced in order to bond her family together with domestic glue, now there was a hole she needed to fill with a life of her own, a life less ordinary, a life that honored who she was and who she wanted to be, while simultaneously providing the stability and security she craved and her little boy desperately needed.

The stories here, much like life, swing between the hilarious and the absurd. Sometimes they are no more than snippets from Alison's vintage housekeeping life, the trials and tribulations of single parenthood, or the calamities every woman finds herself doing battle with, but only Alison, it seems, see fit to share with the blogosphere.

Occasionally her stories are laugh out loud funny, sometimes tinged with the kind of loneliness that is palpable and once or twice so shamefully embarrassing she can hardly bear to read them again! But at its heart BrocanteHome is and always has been about making a home that thrills you right to your fingertips. A home you never want to leave.

There are now more than 2000 posts on BrocanteHome.Net touching upon an eclectic range of vintage-related subjects, but every one of the little essays in this collection, whether they be about single motherhood, the horror of dating in your thirties, or the scents that bring your childhood flooding back, are ultimately about the domestic rituals that shape our worlds, and hopefully show you, her readers, how, domesticity does indeed shore against our ruin.

And so here it is: the best of BrocanteHome. Eight years of Alison May's life as a Vintage Housekeeper: the perfect companion to Alison's earlier Kindle book, "Scrumptious Treats For Vintage Housekeepers"...