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| Saturday, May 20, 2006 |
| Butterflies |
Yesterday in my lunch break I went to a furniture shop.
Adelaide has the highest number of furniture shops per capita of any Australian city. Just incidentally.
Anyway, this furniture shop was called China House Trading (or possibly China Trading House - I can't remember). It is just before the bus stop I get off at on my way to my Thursday/Friday job, and I have gone past it on the bus - peering curiously through the windows - for a total of 6 bus trips TO work and craned my neck to peer through the windows from across the road on my way home from work for a total of 5 evenings. So on Friday I thought I would go in and browse. Seeing as how my usual lunchtime hangout (the Veale Gardens across the road from my building, where there is a creek and a rose garden and droopy trees and parrots and lorikeets and crested pigeons and ducks and mudlarks and some other kind of yellow-beaked bird) was occupied by other members of the Company having a sausage sizzle for lunch, that I was not attending.
As it turns out, it sells furniture of assorted Oriental style. Beautiful, incredible, stunning furniture, carved and painted and gorgeous. A table made from a heavy cart-wheel topped with glass. A low table made from a twisty tree trunk, with little stools surrounding it made from tree stumps - polished smooth on top and with stumpy roots for legs. Massive drawers with ornate carving and austere glass display cabinets lacquered in red.
But while I could have spent a small fortune and furnished at least three houses from that shop, it was the Butterfly Cabinets that I almost, almost, almost lashed out on. If someone had handed me a thousand dollars and said purchase at will, I would have had them delivered that same afternoon.
They were small cabinets, too large to be bedside cabinets, the sort that might go either side of a doorway or in the corner of a reading-room. The tops and sides were painted black, and the doors were painted white. A metal plate - perhaps two handspans wide? - was set right in the middle, over the crack between the two doors. It was shaped like a butterfly, and held the key that opened the lock that kept the doors shut. And all over the cabinets, in all colours and varying shapes and sizes, was a rainbow of butterflys, as if they may take off at any moment and leave the cabinets bare but the air full of fluttering wings.
There was a folding dressing screen that matched.
But while Mr Ata loves me very much, I suspect that even his patience could be stretched by the impulse purchase of incredibly gorgeous cabinets. So I have taken them, stolen them to store away in my Very Own Room. Perhaps either side of the door, opposite the darkly ornate opium bed, so that I may look at them, draped over my piles of silk cushions, whenever I tire of reading. I shall store my tea-set in them, and my wine glasses, the ones set with flashing gems in the stems and heavy glass bases. And when my dearest friends visit - only the closest to my heart, mind you - we shall recline on deep soft floor cushions scattered artfully over the thick elegantly patterned Turkish rugs while we take our tea or sample our wine.
While Two Shoes plays softly in the background, of course. |
posted by Ata @ 8:40 pm  |
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