Rebekah Merkle has dabbled in a number of occupations over the years, informed by and interlaced with her life of racing around after her husband Ben, their five children, and now their growing hoard of grand babies.

At various times she has run a children’s clothing label, edited a literature curriculum, and been a high school humanities teacher at the classical, Christian school their children attended. She is also the author of Eve in Exile, Classical Me, Classical Thee, andSoup Night Slapdashery. . . three wildly disparate works that all reflect various parts of her equally disparate undertakings. She also hosts the erratic podcast What Have You with her sister Rachel Jankovic.

But the constant refrain that has always been there in the background through all those years is her love of design and her desire to bring splashes of color and joy and beauty into the boring corners of day to day living. Those corners are so often handed a beige rubber dish mat, or an ugly acrylic towel, or a bit of bandaid-colored orange-peel textured wall when they could just as easily be outfitted with a fabulous, life enhancing, joyous and abundant bit of color and fun. So while she definitely enjoyed teaching Homer and Ovid and Shelley to rowdy teenagers and would do it again in a heartbeat, her real love has always been digging in to the stupendously fertile soil of the home and trying to recapture something of what it looks like for a woman to faithfully build her house.