Today has got to be one of the most gorgeous, perfect weather-days there ever was, and I was actually out having fun in it for hours, and came back all euphoric -- odd how a combination of temperature and humidity and light and air quality and movement can induce euphoria -- and find my inboxes full to overflowing. Well, I shall endeavor to retain the euphoria while dipping funly into them.
It seems strange to mention it at all then
why mention what someone isn't?
I'm am not a lot of things...
Well, of course any simile is one choice among a lot of possibilities. One doesn't usually say, of a simile not purporting to be other than that, "Why use that simile when there are lots of things what I did looked like but wasn't, actually?"
If I'd said "X, you spend money so profligately that if I didn't know you to be neither a drinker nor nautical, I think you were a drunken sailor," I would be surprised if you said, "Why mention sailor? I'm not in any branch of the armed services."
Now about wood furniture
do you own any oak furniture?
No, but we used to own a large, old, heavy round oak table with those lion-claw feet, a glorious table of the size wonderfully conducive to great conversation and boisterous argument during and after dinner and on into the night. It comfortably seated eight and was my favorite thing. When we rented our house, for the five years we lived in Africa, we rented it furnished with a few large items of furniture, among them the oak table. I advertised, interviewed, and chose the tenants for the first half of our absence, but they had suddenly to leave, and I had an agent rent it for the remainder of the time to a party of her choice, who turned out to be, before we got back, three successive parties of her choice.
When five years had passed and we returned home, the yard was full of derelict cars and the table (along with a number of other items) was gone. Also, btw, although we had, for safety reasons, removed the wood stove from the living room and stored it in the cellar, it had been brought back upstairs and was in use. Which was okay, as they house was still standing. Except that we found, in the cellar, traces of the table, a leg, chunks, chips -- what remained of it after the tenants had burned it.
That was my oak furniture. Sigh. |
