I read both stories in our anthology. I quite enjoyed The Very Old Man With the Enormous Wings. It was about a man who was trying to get crabs out of his house (for the stench was making the baby sick) and finds a man with wings face down in a mud puddle. The man ends up being an old angel who has fallen from heaven. The old woman tells them to kill him, but they dont have the heart to and they keep him in the chicken coop. Word spreads and people start to come to see the angel. They decide to charge a nickel to everyone who wants to see him. The angel is treated very badly and even though they are making a fortune off of him they still treat him like trash. He stays with them for quite some time and at one time they thought he was going to die so they let him sleep in the shed. Finally the weather changes and the wife watches him fly off. Even though she should have been appreciative of him, and even learned the value of patience, she was happy to see him go. It was if he was a burdon to them. What I got from this story kind of is that you need to appreciate the simplicities of your life while you have them because life can change over night when an angel lands in your back yard.
The Yellow Wallpaper was not so easy for me to understand. I think that the lady was mentally ill to say the least, but what drove her more nuts was the fact that everyone else told her she was not. The room that her husband made her stay in was horrible for her. She hated the ugly yellow wallpaper. She begged to not be in that room and in her story that is basically all she focused on. She did love her husband and he made her happy because he doted on her so much. She wrote about that quite a bit. The story took a turn some where and she was seeing a women creeping in the paper trying to get out. She didnt want anyone else to help the woman out. On the last day she locked everyone out and was trying to get the paper all the way off. When her husband finally came in he fainted because it was her that was creeping. I dont understand what was going on there and I am curious to find out. Was she the woman who really was stuck in the wall or did that hideous paper finally take her all the way over the edge?
