Natural Disasters

Long ago, we had to admit, in acquisitive English the Romans knew what they were talking about when they made a negative out of lucky stars by labeling some of the deadly ones disasters, and it's in their very nature, naturally, to be disastrous, to give even their most distant inhabitants and poor dependents hell now and then. Always, inevitably, as sure as we happen to be born in the abnormal course of events, more of them show up at all the wrong times and places and occasions with bad attitudes, ready to be that cave-in, this lightning stroke, that twister, those earthquakes, tsunamis, sudden rearrangements of shores and mountains and half or whole continents, and we're expected to be theirs in sickness and health in what we've dubbed forever and a day with stars still in our eyes and a star-like core still burning under our feet.