Reading time: Less than 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a metaphor from Karen Auvinen…
A few years ago when I was travelling with my family in England, we saw a fox in the backyard of the house where we were staying (in Walton-on-Thames, birthplace of Julie Andrews.) My husband has an undergraduate degree in zoology and loves seeing animals of all descriptions, so he was particularly thrilled.
Perhaps it was this relatively recent interaction with a fox that caused me to read “The Fox Who Came to Dinner,” a New York Times Opinionator piece, that tells the story of a women who starts feeding a wild fox. That woman — Karen Auvinen, a teacher of film and popular culture at a U.S. university and a food blogger — lived in the mountains of Colorado.
Here is how she describes her relationship with the fox:
There were a million reasons not to feed the fox, the least of which was the bigger predators he might attract. But it was too late. He’d developed a habit of sitting on the deck at the top of the steps, just as Elvis [Auvinen’s late dog] had, watching the yard from his perch. Ridiculously, I worried he didn’t have enough food. There were even nights when I went barefoot out into the snow to look for him, calling his name.
But here is the image that particularly captured me:
Sometimes he sat facing the door, looking at the house with the big unblinking eyes of a Victorian beggar.
Isn’t that the perfect way to describe the stare of a hungry fox?