You know? I bet they could all land on the head of a pin.

failed metaphor, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Today on Flickr I noticed that my friend Leslie found a bird's egg and wrote a lovely but somewhat fatalistic metaphor about it.

The photo made me think of the tiny pearl that I found inside an oyster at a restaurant on Tybee Island last week - so I thought I'd take a picture of it and write something a little more cheery as a reply to Leslie's entry.

As I was trying to focus on this glowing little miracle, no larger than a mustard seed (and no, that was a metaphor I was not going to pursue), I was thinking that Leslie is right, we are fragile like an egg, but we can also be persistent and perfect and unexpected, like a pearl made from a speck of grit... and then I dropped the freaking thing and spent the next 25 minutes crawling on the incompletely-clean and by the way very slanted office floor, with my myopic eyes and bursitis-y knees, and I started thinking that sure, perfection exists, but it's so elusive and hard to hold onto and... and friggin SPHERICAL, it could have rolled ANYPLACE in this damn room, and holy crap how did drywall dust end up all the way up HERE? Oh and NICE, that's a dry dead bug I just put my hand on.

So I decided to leave the metaphors to Leslie.