"The electrician memorises the name above the bed of this locker. Later in the week he will ask her out and will find her as lovely as her underwear to him, and a little later still he will tell her about his mother dying, and sitting in the pub one night he'll show her his mother's wedding-ring in its wooden box with the velvet inside."
The husband recalls how he first caught sight of his future wife's underwear while working as an electrician in her dorm. He loves her style and quickly loves the origins of her style as well, her life experiences. In simple language, Smith relates how such a pure attraction soon develops into a meaningful marriage for the two.
"What can I tell you? The sea and the snow and the wind.
Earth and then grass and then snow settling on the grass. Snow choking the narrow gravel paths, nestling into the neck and filling the stone eyes of a praying angel, silently mittening the leafless branches of trees."
As she opens her tale of grieving for her dead mother, the protagonist of "Cold Iron" describes the changing of the seasons. For her, these images are as intimate as her experience of her mom, but they have no inherent meaning, only the significance which she chooses to imbue them with. She chooses to allow the images to speak for themselves, rather then relating her experience of them.
"Pages flutter across motorways or farmland, pages break apart, dissolve in rivers or seas, snag on hedges in suburban areas, cling round their roots. Fragments litter a trail that blows in every direction, skidding across roads in foreign cities, mulching in the wet doorways of small shops, tossed by the weather across grassland and prairies."
Melissa travels the world, leaving behind the remnants of her vast book collection. In this description, the chaotic results of her project become clear to the reader. She's just tearing these books apart and leaving the pages random places. This action becomes symbolic of Melissa's rejection of the power which other people's ideas have held in her opinions.
