See what I did there? Stood a cliché on its head, as advised in Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences, by Anne Lemott and her significant other, Neal Allen which suggests metaphors and similes. How about wolves and horses? And monkeys and donkeys?

In cold weather, my mother liked to say it was cold enough to “freeze the ass off a brass monkey,” bowdlerized for use outside the house as “freeze the ears off a grass donkey.”

Just not the same. There was also “colder than a witch’s tit,” which I dropped because it’s not very feminist or Wiccan. “Madder than a wet hen,” while popular at our house, was fairly widespread.

Mom didn’t grow up on farm, but her mother raised chickens, so “stupid as a chicken with it’s head cut off.” That may also be the source of “south end of a duck going north,” which my grandson already likes, just a week after he learned it. She also used water pumps as a girl, hence “colder than snot on a pump handle in January.[1] Also water-related was “God willing and the creek don’t rise,” which isn’t a metaphor, but does, to me, seem related.

While we’re on the subject of poultry, outsiders sometimes brought in new metaphors (or something like metaphors). Chris Durst brought us “Doesn’t have the sense that God gave geese” from his house.

Mr. Olsen, my best friend’s father and a WWII pilot, noting my lack of focus, used to compare me to “the general who got on his horse and rode off in all directions.” I assume this was a military saying.

This is mine: You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many thumbdrives

[1] She knew a lot about being cold in the winter, as cold is defined in Portland, Oregon. Born in the 1930s, she didn’t have indoor plumbing until she married my dad in 1952; just another reason to love him.