I could pick out the acrid smell of ClaireвЂ™s drenched diaper, her sweaty feet, and her hair crusted with sand. 'I lay still and took another minute to smell: I smelled the warm, sweet, all-pervasive smell of silage, as well as the sour dirty laundry spilling over the basket in the hall.

As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. 'When the others went swimming my son said he was going in, too. In the daytime, in the hot mornings, these motors made a petulant, irritable sound at night, in the still evening when the afterglow lit the water, they whined about one's ears like mosquitoes.' The one-lungers throbbed and fluttered, and the twin-cylinder ones purred and purred, and that was a quiet sound, too. They were one-cylinder and two-cylinder engines, and some were make-and-break and some were jump-spark, but they all made a sleepy sound across the lake. In those other summertimes all motors were inboard and when they were at a little distance, the noise they made was a sedative, an ingredient of summer sleep. This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving. 'The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motors. (John Updike, 'My Father on the Verge of Disgrace' in Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel, 2000) 'In our kitchen, he would bolt his orange juice (squeezed on one of those ribbed glass sombreros and then poured off through a strainer) and grab a bite of toast (the toaster a simple tin box, a kind of little hut with slit and slanted sides, that rested over a gas burner and browned one side of the bread, in stripes, at a time), and then he would dash, so hurriedly that his necktie flew back over his shoulder, down through our yard, past the grapevines hung with buzzing Japanese-beetle traps, to the yellow brick building, with its tall smokestack and wide playing fields, where he taught.'

Different types of imagery