Advent 3: Crashing in

A typically straightforward Irish sign

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but
 still nothing is as shining as it should be
 for you.  Under the sink, for example, is an
 uproar of mice—it is the season of their
 many children.  What shall I do?
— Mary Oliver "Making the House Ready"

I've been on a cleaning binge these last few days, trying to reverse the entropy resulting from several months of travel and writing.  My study is more organized than it has been in more than a year; I catalogued more books; I filed completed projects (though I still have a 3 foot high stack of tear sheets and other writing ephemera teetering in the corner).

The universe, however, always exacts a price for tidiness (cf. the second law of thermodynamics).  The bill came due this afternoon when a woman knocked at the kitchen door. She was in tears, "I just ran into your car."  "Come in," I said.

She'd bumped into the little Green Goddess (the venerable Mini Cooper the kids drive when they are home), breaking its tail light.  I told her not to worry, over the last decade that car had seen more than its share of bumps (here and here and here and here, where Crash earned his blog name and broke the other tail light).  Like Mary Oliver's uproar of mice, what shall I do?  Nothing much but listen.

I broke the news to The Egg by text, he's on his way home from California College.  He's not perturbed, either.  It drives. The heat works.