Aileen Jeffries

There are seven types of E. Coli, I’ve learned. The kind that can kill people lives in meat (well, more specifically feces-contaminated meat) and there’s even a beneficial strain.

The waterborne type isn’t usually deadly. Which is good, because I drank ever-so-much of it the week before Thanksgiving. I was
attempting to rehydrate after an evening o’ food poisoning. Turns out West Portland’s always-delicious tap water was tainted. With POO.

On the plus side, I lost about 4 pounds. And it wasn’t even that bad, nothing like actual food poisoning. There must be a way to market this.

In my, shall I say, unusual childhood, we had a huge garden that was the source of most of our food. Row upon row of peas, sugar beets, carrots and squash.

Farming on the Canadian Shield is never easy – the soil is poor and shallow and in no month is it guaranteed not to snow. But while I spent hours and hours of my youth weeding and taking out rocks and digging up potatoes, the worry and responsibility of growing enough food to make it through the winter rested on the squarely shoulders of my parents, not mine. Which is how it should be when you’re six.

Now that I finally have the space and time (this is debatable) to grow my own garden, the stakes are considerably lower. I live just a few blocks from a weekly farmers market. I’m married to someone who distrusts food that doesn’t come wrapped tightly in cellophane and considers iceberg lettuce to be a vegetable (it isn’t, of course, it’s crunchy, pale-green water). We’re so far off from being successful survivalists, we don’t even have a root cellar.
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I’m not sure how this happened, but our garden has become a sort of spider sanctuary.

They are everywhere, usually at the level of my neck. My delicate, exposed, thin-skinned neck. They can probably see the blood coursing through my veins, just below the milky-white surface.

I’ve come to know a few the spiders, if not as friends, certainly acquaintances. There’s Eunice, who is either full with egg sack or just a very successful eater and has made the doorway to the basement her home. Yesterday, I watched her defend her territory against another spider, smaller of body but longer of leg, who wanted to build her web in the same doorway. As I watched, I backed up slightly because Eunice and her adversary were level with my eyes and seemed to be both accomplished jumpers and ferocious biters. It was only as I turned away to head back up the stairs that I noticed I’d backed right into Green Bean Spider’s web. Luckily, she’s a little more timid and chose to flee rather than attack the back of my head.
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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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Before Kea came along, I never understood why parents of young children would specify their progeny’s ages in months. Why not years, like normal people? Now, of course, I realize that babies and toddlers develop and change so quickly that calling Kea a one-year-old could mean anything from “she just started walking” to “she speaks in complete sentences.”

At almost fourteen months, Kea is officially more worldly than was Sarah Palin at the onset of her brief stint as Governor of Alaska. Our baby girl has travelled all over central Europe, visited Nashville and, last week, went with us on a short trip to New York.

Best parts of the trip:
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