At the Treillage Café...



... I was going to say get out of the grid, but you have to stay on the grid to jabber in The Treillage Café. Meade taught me the word treillage. I was going to say "trellis," but treillage sounds a little exotic. I did a Google image search on the word to make sure I wasn't getting it wrong, and the first couple things that came up made me worry for a moment that I'd stumbled into the name of some subdivision of bondage fetishism. The next step in my research was the Oxford English Dictionary (to which I cannot link). Meadhouse dialogue:

ALTHOUSE: Trellage is not even in the Oxford English Dictionary.

MEADE: French!

Trellis, however, is. My favorite historical OED quotes for trellis:

1861   Bp. S. Wilberforce Let. in Life (1881) II. xiii. 454   The earthly love becomes the trellice, up which the heavenly love creeps.
1894   H. Drummond Lowell Lect. Ascent Man 193   Language formed the trellis on which Mind climbed upward.

What metaphorical trellis — treillage — is supporting your upward aspirations? (The shadow the trellis makes on the grass — the focus of this photograph — is a also metaphor, though I don't have quotes for that easily at hand.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Rabel said: "OED may have it with an 'i' before the first l.'" Ah! You are right. Meade only said the word, so I take responsibility for misspelling. I've corrected the spelling in the post, except at the spot where I'm not finding it in the OED. In fact, treillage is in the OED:

1712   J. Addison Spectator No. 477. ¶1   There are as many kinds of Gardening as of Poetry:..Contrivers of Bowers and Grotto's, Treillages and Cascades, are Romance Writers.