Hailstones and coals of fire

Life has gotten so busy that I am keeping a calendar for the first time in my life. No longer can I depend on keeping it all in my head, and so I write things down, and good thing, too. It leaves a distinct paper trail of exactly how busy we are.

Last weekend my dad and three brothers drove down to help install a central vacuum system in our house. What ease and convenience! Daddy has always installed one wherever we lived, so I’ve grown up with one. Being without and dealing with clunky upright models for the past two years has been quite the rude awakening. Some people, when I tell them about it, have never even heard of such a concept, and others tell me horror stories of people who tried vacuuming out the still-smouldering ashes from their fireplace and burned the house down. I think the worst I ever did was to stick the nozzle in the toilet (when I was very young) and watch the water get sucked away.

Last night we had a terrific hailstorm. It was loud and almost frightening, and I was greatly relieved not to lose electricity at all. Michael made a bowl of truly excellent guacamole, which we devoured entirely, and we watched Fried Green Tomatoes. I was disappointed that I was too tired to think it through thoroughly, because it begged further reflection. It reminded me strongly of Gone with the Wind, with the parallel story line of an unlikely friendship between two women of very different personalities, one extremely strong and rebellious and the other meek and good-spirited. There was the same sense of desolation and poverty, of sadness for an era gone by and a frustration at the sense of social injustice. Then there’s the question of why two wrong don’t make a right, and whether it’s right to threaten a man who’s beating his wife. Was it right for her to leave him? Why was there no legal protection for her? Why was the jury so prejudiced against her, insisting that no good Christian woman would leave her husband? Why was the law so corrupt as to prevent innocent bystanders from prosecuting ruthless vandals who attacked their private property? If I had lived in that era, what could I have done to fight against the wrongs of the system?