Aileen Jeffries

I like to think the efficiency of a household can be judged by how quickly all the clocks are adjusted after the start or end of daylight savings. The night before? That Sunday? Never, because eventually the time will be correct again?

Further, I imagine one spring or fall, someone is going to come to my house and check to see if I got all the clocks. This person will probably be FLOTUS Michelle Obama or possibly Martha Stewart herself. It is this sort of thinking that motivates me to open the car manual to figure out how to change the dashboard clock and summit the creaky kitchen chair and incidentally reveals the depth of my neurosis.

Anyhow, back to making neat, even vacuum cleaner plow lines in the carpet…

I do not pine for olden days. This is by far the best time and place to be alive in human history. To defend this stance, I need only mention a handful of inventions: anesthesia, birth control, democracy, the Internet.

Simply put, there was no “Golden Era” of anything. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements. If a particular population had it good during a decade of yore (consider white men in the 1950’s or, oh, ever), it was at the expense of someone else.

That said, not everything about history is terrible. There are exactly three things I’d like to revive and incorporate into my otherwise contented, modern existence.

1. Wallpaper.

2. Desserts made with gelatin. Even in our modern times, gelatin is derived from the collagen inside animals’ skin and bones. There’s something satisfyingly thrifty about making food with scraps. My favorite is panna cotta topped with cherries. Made with cream, yogurt, almond extract, and honey. And domestic animal by-products.

3. Silhouette portraits. Popular before photography, I imagine the process originally involved a flickering candle as the only light source and tracing the shadow on a barn door or traveling circus tent with a lump of charcoal from the campfire.

Digital cameras, electricity and Photoshop make silhouette portraiture easier these days. Squirming, unruly subjects – in my case a toddler – add just enough challenge to keep it interesting.

This vase came from Pottery Barn. I’m normally not into things that are new but artificially distressed to look old but I couldn’t resist this one. I like the mustard yellow and the texture and the contrast between this vase and the more modern items in the foyer. I knew it would look smashing with the tansy in this bouquet. Matching a vase to the flowers is probably like matching an outfit to shoes, but I do that too.
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There are plenty of reasons I’ve chosen to live on the West Coast over the East (living in the flyover hinterlands is a non-starter). The summers are much better, truly wild places still exist out here and there’s an optimistic, inventive spirit in our populace that makes up for the meth problem and sky-high unemployment rate.

But, one thing the East Coast has on the West is historic architecture. In Portland’s Old Town, the buildings boast their age – 1869, 1886, etc. And for Portland, that’s old.  But in cities on the East Coast, there are houses that were built over a century before that. There’s a confidence of place that comes with age, a sense that the neighborhood has settled into a character that will remain unchanged in the decades to come.

In 2007, Kes and I visited Washington, D.C. over Labor Day weekend. We spent several hours roaming around Georgetown, between eating breakfast at a crêperie and escaping the afternoon heat with gin & tonics in an excessively air-conditioned bar.

As we walked about Georgetown, we noticed a pattern in the door knockers. Most were heavy, elaborate affairs, no doubt forged in a time when there were still blacksmiths. The ones that really caught our attention were foxes. We speculated they marked the inhabitants as members of a secret society, the kind of society that determines which countries we’ll be invading in ten to twenty years. We brought up the fox door knockers with our bartender and he dismissed them as showy affectations of the newly rich. Which is exactly the sort of thing you’d say if you didn’t want outsiders sniffing around your secret societies.

Since that trip, I’ve traversed the Internet looking for a fox knocker for our own door. I even inquired at Chown, a local hardware purveyor catering to wealthy mechanism fetishists. My search was fruitless for the first year. Undaunted, I kept checking back, secure in the knowledge that the Internet Provides All to the patient, finally finding the perfect fox door knocker this May. The misspelling of “Manufacturers” in the Web site’s banner is distressing – nothing says “we’ll sell your credit card info to the highest bidder” quite like blatant typos. But, I took the chance and a short week later, my fox knocker arrived.

We installed it over the weekend, a feat that was complicated by the “hand crafted” nature of the knocker (read: nothing about it lines up and the bolts are, suspiciously, metric). Kea loves banging it. Our nanny thinks it is a little on the threatening, scary side. I’m just waiting for the emissary from the West Coast cell of the Società delle Volpi to come a’knocking.

Doors of Georgetown
Knockers & Handles