Aileen Jeffries

My aunt Holly gave me a gift certificate to a garden store but I’ve run out of room for plants until I manage to kill a few so I got a garden Buddha. My purchase decision was based on a design problem, not a desire for spiritual enlightenment. There was a spot in the garden – a pathway to nowhere – that needed a focal point.

Kes wasn’t enthused by my new find. He implied it might fall victim to an unfortunate sledgehammer accident. He posed a corollary, “What if you came home to a giant Jesus statue in the front yard?” I would gripe, he would explain he got it with a gift certificate, I would be forced by his unassailable logic to relent and welcome stone Jesus.

There’s something a little odd about owning a statue of the Enlightened One from a faith to which I do not adhere. Not counting Lisa Simpson (and there are good reasons not to count her; I don’t know her personally, also, a cartoon) I don’t  actually know any Buddhists. Buddhism appeals to me over other religions because I don’t often hear of Buddhists blowing themselves up in order to kill as many members of a competing religion as possible. The little sculpture exudes serenity and complacency. I could swear the corn is growing faster in its presence.

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

In my quest to become a Gardener, I have a few things going for me. I’m naturally messy. I have no problem with dirt or worms or compost smells. I like to eat, a whole lot, especially fresh produce that grows just a few feet from our door. I’m a designer by profession and training. I recognize the importance of framing views; of considering the foreground, the middle, and the distance in compositions. And I have friends – landscape designer friends – who know the difference between a hosta and a huchera, a hebe and a hellebore.

Of course, I also have a few deficiencies working against me. I’m impatient. I know that one day the deciduous magnolia will arch its sturdy branches over the entire back garden, with a crest of voluptuous pink petals presiding over April. But right now, it is only about 4 feet high. Grow. Faster.

I’m also limited for time. Someday soon, I will be able to put Kea’s small, nimble fingers to work pulling weeds and thinning carrots. For now, her gardening skills are limited to plucking the flowers off my euphorbia one by one and arranging these spoils in a dainty bench pile. So I hurry home from work, hoping to catch a half hour to water the garden before Kea awakens from her happy hour nap.

Gardening inspires the most hackneyed sort of pop philosophy so I’ll avoid opining on the inner peace that comes with tending my little patch of land. Instead, photos!