dear, old things?
When we can afford to, we furnish our lives with favorite things. Controlling space is a luxury and can be fun: we create our surroundings from chosen furniture and clothing, bedsheets and wallpaper, automobiles and porch swings. Familiarity and comfort can attach us to things; unusual decoration and eccentric history can make things ours alone. Every object can be one-of-a-kind. And then take on a life of its own in the context of its use and its importance in our surroundings. But we create the contexts, still.
Sometimes we invest ourselves the most in the least complicated, least intrusive things in our lives.
"In the timber trade, in Great Britain, a deal is understood to be 9 inches wide, not more than 3 inches thick, and at least 6 feet long. If shorter, it is a deal-end; if not more than 7 inches wide, it is a batten. In N. America, the standard deal (to which other sizes are reduced in computation) is 12 feet long, 11 inches wide, and 2-1/2 inches thick. By carpenters, deal of half this thickness (1-1/4 inches) is called whole deal."
--O.E.D., 2nd Edition
