There’s something strangely vulnerable about putting together a “comfort issue.”
You would think a magazine centered around mothers, home, warmth, recipes, flowers, gathering spaces, and all the things that make life feel soft would come naturally. Instead, this issue challenged me more than almost any other one so far. Maybe because comfort is harder to define when you are still actively building it for yourself.
I realized while working on this month’s Home & Hearth content that most of what I know about homemaking has come from other people. Contributors. Mothers. Grandmothers. Women who know how to arrange a dining table, grow hydrangeas, host a Sunday lunch, or somehow keep a house smelling like cinnamon and clean laundry at the same time. Meanwhile, I still live with my mother and regularly survive off vibes, coffee, and “I’ll clean it tomorrow.”
But for the first time in my life, that is changing.
Within the next month, I will officially become a resident of the Antique Village in Denham Springs, directly across from the historic Old City Hall on Mattie Street. If you know me personally, then you know how emotional that sentence is for me. There is something deeply poetic about ending up in the heart of old Denham Springs, surrounded by history, brick streets, antique stores, old oak trees, and buildings that have seen generations come and go before me.
The home itself has original flooring, old bones, and the kind of character you simply cannot manufacture anymore. The creaks, imperfections, and history are exactly what make me love it. I joke all the time that Gen Z romanticizes old houses like Victorian ghosts are a personality trait, but honestly… guilty.
And speaking of history, the building sitting directly across from me has plenty of its own.
So while this month’s issue may have stretched me creatively, I think it also quietly reflects where I am in life right now. Somewhere between daughter and homemaker. Between comfort being something given to me and comfort becoming something I create myself.
The next few issues of Living In Parish will probably begin reflecting that journey a little more closely. Home & Hearth may slowly become less “Here is a perfect house tip from someone more qualified than me” and more “Here is Lizzie trying to figure out antique furniture placement while pretending she understands curtain lengths.”
You’ll get to watch me curate this little antique home in real time. The successes, the chaos, the thrift finds, the local pieces, the stories attached to old objects, and probably several questionable design decisions along the way.
One thing I’m especially excited about is that the corner of Benton and Mattie Street will also feature a community food pantry hosted by Whole Heart Health. That means this little corner of town will not only become home to me and the magazine office, but also a place rooted in service to others. That matters deeply to me.
And yes, since my office will officially be there too, I mean it when I say: for all your magazine needs, you know where to find me.
Probably barefoot, carrying coffee, moving antique furniture I bought impulsively, and trying to keep a 1940s house alive one Facebook Marketplace find at a time. — Lizzie
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Baudoin
CoOwner
Editor
Living In Parish Magazine
