What was Flora like, anyway?

This is not a picture of Flora! This is a royalty-free
picture of a dark-haired woman from the Internet.

While I was writing the previous post, I scrolled back through my old emails looking for a couple of data points. In the process, I stumbled across an email from Marie back in 2020 that included the following description:

It suddenly occurred to me … that there are in fact certain obvious points of similarity between my mom and the woman who occupied most of my erotic imagination for years, long ago.

(Put differently, between the two very different women who occupied most of my erotic imagination during my youth.)  

Beautiful, check.  To men, check.  Dark-haired and a bit exotic-looking, check.  A bit of the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" glamour, check.  Brighter than most of her contemporaries, check.  Unwilling to settle for provincial dullness...

Ulp.  Hosea, love, this is sort of unsettling.

So maybe this helps you picture her.

I also found that way back when Marie briefly re-contacted Flora—when Flora's reply confirmed that she had a new boyfriend (now that her husband had died) but hinted tactfully (at least to my ears) that they weren't monogamous yet—I did indeed call that implication to Marie's attention. Marie, for her part, thought that I was overthinking things.