Prodigal Summer

“It was only four hours later, in the eleventh hour of the ninth of May, as the dryer clicked and droned downstairs and she sat beside her bedroom window reading, that Lusa’s life turned over on this one simple thing: a potent rise of scent as her young husband reached out his muscled arm for a branch of flowers. Here was what she’d forgotten about, the full, straight truth of their attachment. Her heart emptied of words, for once, and filled with a new species of feeling. Even if he never reached the house, if his trip across the field was disastrously interrupted by the kind of tractor accident that felled farmers in this steep county, she would still have had a burst of fragrance reaching across a distance to explain Cole’s position in the simplest terms conceivable.” 

In this quote, Cole is reaching for a branch of honeysuckle—the same plant he argued with Lusa about—to bring back to his wife. From this one simple action, honeysuckles, and particularly the scent of honeysuckles, will become a symbolic reminder of Cole’s presence even after his death. Cole and Lusa are communicating through scent, “a burst of fragrance reaching across a distance,” just as the moths Lusa studies call to each other through pheromones. For Lusa, this animal form of communication brings “a new species of feeling,” something more profound than human words. 

“Lusa sat still and marveled: This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he’s not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark. […] For several more minutes her hands lay motionless on her book while she considered a language that could carry nothing but love and simple truth.” 

Here, Lusa considers how the natural world—and particularly moths, the creatures she loves most—can transcend the pitfalls of human communication. Newly-married Cole and Lusa have been exchanging “the wrong words” far too often, to the point that Lusa is contemplating divorce, but in a mute species like moths “the wrong words are impossible.” Rather, natural communication carries an inevitability, an innate attraction that draws two lovers to “find each other in the dark.” For Lusa, this natural, unspoken language is a “marvel” deeper than human words.

“She sat cross-legged on the floor of the porch, brushing out her hair and listening to the opening chorus of this day. A black-and-white warbler had started it long before dawn, breaking into her sleep with his high-pitched ‘Sweet sweet!’ Deanna could picture him out there, circling the trunk of a poplar, tilting his tiny little zebra-striped head toward the first hints of light, tearing yesterday off the calendar and opening the summer of love with his outsized voice. She’d rushed out to the porch in her nightgown and bare feet, the hairbrush mostly an afterthought lying on her lap. She needed to listen to this: prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.” 

This quote illustrates the emphasis on fertility and reproduction throughout Prodigal Summer, and the novel’s insistence that humans are just another interconnected part of the natural world. Taking place almost entirely during the “prodigal summer” this quote describes, the novel abounds with depictions of mating and procreation, and humans, no different from nature’s other creatures, are among those who cannot “resist” this drive to procreate. Deanna herself accepts her “body’s decision” (24) to embark on an affair with Eddie Bondo, leading her to create new life through her pregnancy as the novel continues.

“So many others never would rise again: Bachman’s warbler, passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, Flint’s stonefly, Apamea moth—so many extinct creatures moved through the leaves just outside her peripheral vision, for Deanna knew enough to realize that she lived among ghosts. She deferred to the extinct as she would to the spirits of deceased relatives, paying her quiet respects in the places where they might once have been. Little red wolves stood as silent shadows at the edges of clearings, while the Carolina parakeets would have chattered loudly, moving along the riverbanks in huge flocks of dazzling green and orange. The early human settlers migrating into this region had loved them and promptly killed them.” 

This quote describes how human interference upsets the natural balance of an ecosystem, ultimately killing species such as the red wolves and Carolina parakeets in Deanna’s beloved Appalachia. Deanna is haunted by the “ghosts” of these extinct creatures, just as all the novel’s major characters are haunted by ghosts of one sort or another. Deanna’s reverence and respect for these animals extends to her care for the still-living natural world, as she works to prevent human interference from hunters throughout the novel.

“He was haunted by the ghosts of these old chestnuts, by the great emptiness their extinction had left in the world, and so this was something Garnett did from time to time, like going to the cemetery to be with dead relatives: he admired chestnut wood. He took a moment to honor and praise its color, its grain, and its miraculous capacity to stand up to decades of weather without pressure treatment or insecticides. Why and how, exactly, no one quite knew. There was no other wood to compare with it. A man could only thank the Lord for having graced the earth with the American chestnut, that broad-crowned, majestic source of nuts and shade and durable lumber.”

This quote again describes a character haunted by “ghosts” of the natural world; this time, Garnett Walker mourns the lost American chestnut. Unlike most of the other ghosts in the novel, the chestnut has left beyond clear physical relics, reminders of the species’ strength and beauty that was destroyed by humans meddling in the natural world. Garnett compares admiring chestnut wood to visiting dead relatives at a graveyard, and in a sense, chestnuts are Garnett’s relatives, his heritage. Garnett’s ancestors built a fortune from chestnut wood, and the tree’s legacy forms an integral part of Garnett’s identity. Garnett also affirms his religious faith as he honors the chestnut; he’s sure God has “graced the earth” with this “majestic” species. 

“This lesser tree had been spared for a divine purpose, like some of the inferior animals on Noah’s ark. Garnett understood that on his slow march toward his heavenly reward, he would spend as many years as possible crossing and backcrossing the American with the Chinese chestnut. He worked like a driven man, haunted by his arboreal ghosts, and had been at it for nearly a decade now. If he lived long enough he would produce a tree with all the genetic properties of the original American chestnut, except one: it would retain from its Chinese parentage the ability to stand tall before the blight. It would be called the Walker American chestnut. He would propagate this seedling and sell it by mail order that it might go forth and multiply in the mountains and forests of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and all points north to the Adirondacks and west to the Mississippi. The landscape of his father’s manhood would be restored.” 

In a novel dominated by female characters, Garnett stands out as an example of traditional masculinity, bolstered by his faith in God. Garnett believes he has a “divine purpose” to resurrect the American chestnut, and the man sees himself as behaving like God himself, creating and naming a new species to affirm his family’s “manhood.” Ironically, Garnett is actually engaging in a process much like natural evolution, as he cross-breeds species with different traits in order to produce a stronger offspring. As the novel continues, Garnett adamantly supports Creationism over evolution, even as he uses evolutionary principles to attempt to bring his “arboreal ghosts” back to life.

“The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.” 

While moths feature most prominently in Lusa’s storyline, Deanna, here, admires a moth with the same attention to detail as Lusa often does. Throughout the novel, Kingsolver includes subtle overlaps of images and symbols between different storylines, like the moth imagery here. These links underscore the novel’s theme of interconnectedness within the natural world; natural creatures actually connect human characters to each other. In addition, the statement that “so much detail goes unnoticed” reflects one of the author’s key missions in the novel: through her vivid, precise descriptions of even the smallest, seemingly most ordinary natural phenomena, Kingsolver urges readers to pay attention to the wonders we usually overlook.

“[…] If more of [the chestnuts] had been spared they could have repopulated these mountains over time, but nobody thought about that. Not one person. They just sawed the last ones down, hell for leather.

He turned his acute gaze on Deanna. ‘That’s why you live up here by yourself, isn’t it? You can’t stand how people are.’

She weighed this, feeling its truth inside herself like damp sand. ‘I don’t want to feel that way,’ she said finally. ‘There’s people I love. But there’s so many other kinds of life I love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own.’”

This quote illustrates the damage that occurs when humans feel they have the right to take control over the natural world, without considering or understanding the consequences of their actions. For those people who truly love and respects all sorts of life, like Deanna, living with “hateful” humans is almost unbearable. At first, it appears that Deanna has isolated herself, living up on a mountain “by herself” and rarely interacting with other humans. However, as Kingsolver reminds readers at both the beginning and end of her novel, “solitude is a human presumption” (444), and Deanna actually lives amid a rich ecosystem of plants and animals, “the kinds of life [she] love[s].”

“‘I don’t love animals as individuals, I guess that’s the way to put it,’ she said. ‘I love them as whole species. I feel like they should have the right to persist in their own ways. If there’s a house cat put here by human carelessness, I can remedy that by taking one life, or ignore it and let the mistake go on and on.’

‘How much damage could a cat really do?’

‘You wouldn’t believe how much. I could show you a list of species that have been wiped out because of people’s laziness about cats.’” 

Here, Deanna expresses her main philosophy governing her interactions with the natural world, one closely shared by Lusa and Nannie: she believes plant and animal species “should have the right to persist in their own ways.” However, allowing nature to persist can require humans to take an active role, to correct earlier damage done by other humans. While a house cat is certainly a natural creature, Deanna believes she has the right—the duty, even—to end that one creature’s life, if doing so will preserve an entire ecosystem threatened by that animal’s invasive predation. In addition, this quote again emphasizes the damage even the smallest human action can cause to the natural world, as Deanna has an entire “list” of species gone extinct because of house cats. 

“‘Right. But then there’s the world, which has got these rules nobody can change. That’s what’s wrong with people: they can’t see that.’

‘And what rule of the world says it’s a sin to kill a predator?’

‘Simple math, Eddie Bondo, you know this stuff. One mosquito can make a bat happy for, what, fifteen seconds before it starts looking for another one? But one bat might eat two hundred mosquitoes in a night. Figure it out, where’s the gold standard here? Who has a bigger influence on other lives?’

‘OK already, I get it,’ he said. ‘Chill.’

‘Chill yourself,’ she said. ‘I didn’t make up the principles of ecology. If you don’t like them go live on some other planet.’” 

In this quote, Deanna emphasizes the importance of predators, demonstrating that predator species have a “bigger influence” on the natural ecosystem than prey species do. The passage contrasts characters like Eddie, who wants to “change” the world by hunting down the predators he hates, with others like Deanna, who believes the world has “rules nobody can change.” This quote also illustrates the growing animosity in Deanna and Eddie’s relationship, as these two strong-minded, predator-like characters each refuse to concede to the other’s viewpoint. Since Eddie and Deanna are unable to reach a compromise, the author foreshadows the inevitable end of their relationship, while also developing the theme of predator-prey relationships in the novel.

“Are we humans to think of ourselves merely as one species among many, as you always insist in our discussions of how a person might live in “harmony” with “nature” while still managing to keep the Japanese beetles from entirely destroying his trees? Do you believe a human holds no more special authority in this world than, say, a Japanese beetle or a salamander? If so, then why is it our duty to set free the salamanders, any more than it is the salamander’s place to swim up to the state prison in Marion and liberate the criminals incarcerated there?” 

In this quote, part of a letter from Garnett to Nannie, Garnett questions the logic of Nannie’s belief that humans should live in “‘harmony’ with ‘nature.’” Garnett asks why humans should take action to protect other natural creatures, if people are supposedly no more special than these other species. However, Garnett fails to consider the fact that when protecting aspects of nature, people are often rectifying an imbalance created by other humans’ behavior. For instance, the salamanders Garnett refers to here are going extinct because humans catch and use them as bait. Despite the flaws in his argument, Garnett does bring up an important point here: in order to help maintain nature’s balance, people can’t always remain passive, and instead sometimes have to act directly to influence nature, and particularly to correct a previous imbalance.

“Or are we to think of ourselves as keepers and guardians of the earth, as God instructed us to do in Genesis 1:27-30, ‘So God created man in his own image…and God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it!...Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth”—such as salamanders, Miss Rawley—“wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat”; and it was so. If the Holy Bible is to be believed, we must view God’s creatures as gifts to his favored children and use them for our own purposes, even if this occasionally causes this one or that to go extinct after a while.’” 

In this quote, Garnett connects his belief in man’s right to use nature “for our own purposes” to his religious conviction. Garnett believes that because humans were created in God’s “own image,” humans are superior to the rest of the natural world and free to act in a godlike manner. Throughout the novel, Garnett acts like a god, crossbreeding chestnut trees in an effort to create a new species he plans to name after himself, just as God created beings in God’s own image. Ironically, while Garnett here claims the extinction of a few species is inconsequential, his own life has been profoundly influenced by the extinction of the American chestnut tree. Even in Garnett’s viewpoint, the author finds a way to illustrate the harm human interference has caused in the natural world, though Garnett himself chooses not to acknowledge this damage.

“Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don’t see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that’s the moral of the story. There’s even a thing called the Volterra principle that I read about in my orcharding journal, which is all about how insecticide spraying actually drives up the numbers of the bugs you’re trying to kill. Oh, it’s an aggravation and a marvel. The world is a grand sight more complicated than we like to let on.” 

In Nannie’s response to Garnett’s letter, she articulates one of the main themes of the novel: the idea that every aspect of nature is connected. Nannie directly rebuts Garnett’s belief that man can and should control nature, as she says that “things you try to control will often rear back and bite you.” Further explaining her argument, Nannie touches on another theme of the novel, the importance of predators: insecticides kill valuable predators and thus increase “the bugs you’re trying to kill.” Nannie also affirms the fact that while nature may be frustrating, it is also a “marvel,” full of wondrous, ever-changing natural life and unexpected connections. 

“‘I’m partial to the passage from Genesis you quoted, but I wonder if you really understand it. God gave us every herb-bearing seed, it says, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed. He gave us the mystery of a world that can re-create itself again and again. To you the fruit shall be food, he’s saying, but just remember, to the tree it’s a child. “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat.” He’s looking out for the salamanders there, you see? Reminding us that there’s life in them, too, and that even weeds and pond algae are sacred because they’re salamander food. You’re a religious man, Mr. Walker. Seems to me you’d think twice about spraying Roundup all over God’s hard work.’”

In her rebuttal to Garnett’s letter, Nannie challenges the notion that the Bible claims man’s dominion over other creatures. Rather, Nannie argues that one can honor God and still respect all of nature; furthermore, to disrespect nature is actually to disrespect God and his “hard work.” Nannie also alludes to one of the main themes in the novel: the idea that even the smallest aspect of nature has a purpose and affects the whole. As Nannie puts it, “even weeds and pond algae are sacred because they’re salamander food.” Nannie also touches on procreation, as she marvels over a world that constantly “recreate[s] itself,” a process readers see played out in many ways throughout the novel.

“She thought about the things people did with their highly praised hands: made fires that burned out; sawed down trees to build houses that would rot and fall down in time. How could those things compare with the grace of a moth on a leaf, laying perfect rows of tiny, glassy eggs? Or a phoebe weaving a nest of moss in which to hatch her brood?” 

In this quote, Deanna contemplates the impermanence of human accomplishments. Humans work so hard to make their mark on the world, taking elements of nature like trees and using them to build houses, but even the strongest house will eventually fall. Her thoughts bring to mind Garnett Walker and his family, who built a fortune by sawing down chestnut trees then lost it all when nature took back control and the trees died out. As Deanna realizes, human attempts to take control will not last forever, and often destroy elements of nature in the process. By contrast, the accomplishments of plants and animals are renewable ones, constantly creating and nurturing new life, here symbolized by the eggs representing procreation and the nest standing in for protection and nurture.

“‘What you’re doing is artificial selection,’ she replied calmly. ‘Nature does the same thing, just slower. This “evolution” business is just a name scientists put on the most obvious truth in the world, that every kind of living thing adjusts to changes in the place where it lives. Not during its own life, but you know, down through the generations. Whether you believe in it or not, it’s going on right under your nose over there in your chestnuts.’

‘You’re saying that what I do with chestnut trees, God does with the world.’

‘It’s a way to look at it. Except you have a goal, you know what you want. In nature it’s predators, I guess, a bad snap of weather, things like that, that cull out the weaker genes and leave the strong ones to pass on. It’s not so organized as you are, but it’s just as dependable. It’s just the thing that always happens.’” 

Here, Nannie points out that even though Garnett claims not to believe in evolution, he uses evolutionary principles in his own quest to resurrect the American chestnut. Nannie demonstrates that religious faith and a belief in evolution need not be mutually exclusive: one can look at evolution as what “God does with the world,” or as a more random series of events that “cull out the weaker genes.” Either way, stronger traits survive and are passed down to future generations. The author touches on two other themes of the novel here as well: the importance of predators, who help to “cull” those weaker elements, and the significance of procreation, which ensures the stronger genes are passed on.

“In the summer after her husband’s death Lusa discovered lawn-mower therapy. The engine’s vibrations roaring through her body and its thunderous noise in her ears seemed to bully all human language from her head, chasing away the complexities of regret and recrimination. It was a blessing to ride over the grass for an hour or two as a speechless thing, floating through a universe of vibratory sensation. By accident, she had found her way to the mind-set of an insect.” 

Throughout the novel, Lusa has difficulty with human communication and often favors the wordless messages expressed by her beloved insects. At the beginning of the novel, Lusa chose to value her and Cole’s unspoken gestures of love more than their bitter verbal exchanges; after Cole’s death, she turns to primal sensations, deeper than human thoughts, to soothe her grief. As Lusa takes refuge in “the mind-set of an insect,” Kingsolver again reminds readers that humans are part of the natural world, and are as influenced by the “sensations” beneath words as every other living creature.

“Crys turned suddenly from Lusa and tossed the grass stem away. ‘Why do you have to keep [the farm]?’

‘That’s a good question. I’m asking myself that question. You know what I come up with?’

‘What?’

‘Ghosts.’

[…] Crys pulled a handful of grass out of the ground. ‘Ghosts of who?’

‘People who have lost things, I think. Some are your family, and some are from mine.[…] Maybe I shouldn’t even call them ghosts. It’s just stuff you can’t see. That I believe in, probably more than most people. Certain kinds of love you can’t see. That’s what I’m calling ghosts.’”

In this quote, Lusa clearly articulates for the first time why the ghosts at the Widener farm are so important to her. Lusa realizes the ghosts have “lost” things—her own ancestors, in particular, have lost their land and farms—and by keeping the Widener farm and ensuring it thrives, she can in a sense reclaim this lost land. Moreover, Lusa believes the ghosts are “certain kinds of love you can’t see”—love like Cole’s and Lusa’s, Cole’s and Jewel’s, and the love all of Lusa’s ghosts feel for their land. Ghosts, like scents and other forms of unspoken communication, become a way to articulate and understand truths that can’t always be seen or heard.

“She could see now exactly what it was: the cabin’s summerlong resident guardian angel who kept down the mice, the devil who took the phoebes, the author of that slow sandpaper sound in the roof—her blacksnake. He was leaving. Deanna planted her feet and watched the entire, unbelievable length of him pour out the small hole in the side of the roof gable. He oozed down the log wall in an undulating, liquid flow like a line of molasses spilling over the edge of a pitcher. When most of his length had emerged, he suddenly dropped into the tall grass, which trembled and then went still. Then he was gone, for good. Just like that, today of all days, for reasons she would never be able to know. Whether she had loved or hated this snake was of absolutely no consequence to his departure. She considered this fact as she watched him go, and she felt something shift inside her body—relief, it felt like, enormous and settled, like a pile of stones on a steep slope suddenly shifting and tumbling slightly into the angle of repose.

The pounding of What do I want went still in her breast. It didn’t matter what she chose. The world was what it was, a place with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction. Creatures lived and mated and died, they came and went, as surely as summer did. They would go their own ways, of their own accord.”

In this quote, Kingsolver brings a new element to her use of predator animals as symbols and plot threads. Here, Deanna ascribes human values to a predator, calling a snake both an “angel” providing population control and a “devil” who murders baby birds. However, Deanna quickly reminds herself that the snake exists outside of her emotions, in a world without human value judgments, with “its own rules of hunger and satisfaction.” Deanna accepts that her relationship with Eddie is a part of this natural world, and, as such, she can’t control it. Whether Deanna wants Eddie to stay or go makes no difference to the inevitable, ever-changing progression of life, and this realization gives her “relief” from her emotional agony.

“This was the day, would always be the day, when she first knew. She would step somehow from the realm of ghosts that she’d inhabited all her life to commit herself irrevocably to the living. On the trail up to this overlook today she had paid little mind to the sadness of lost things moving through the leaves at the edges of her vision, the shadowy little wolves and the bright-winged parakeets hopping wistfully through untouched cockleburs. These dispossessed creatures were beside her and always would be, but just for today she noticed instead a single bright-red berry among all the clusters of green ones covering the spicebushes. This sign seemed meaningful and wondrous, standing as a divide between one epoch of her life and the next. If the summer had to end somewhere, why couldn’t it be in that one red spicebush berry beside the path?”

In this quote, summer’s season of fertility and procreation is drawing to a close, leading to a shift for both the natural world and the novel’s human characters. Deanna sees a berry—a part of summer’s final harvest—as a symbol of this seasonal “divide,” which is Deanna’s divide as well: When fall arrives, she’ll be leaving the mountain, where she’s lived alone for two years, and returning to human civilization in order to reap her own harvest, and give birth to her child. In addition to Kingsolver’s emphasis on procreation, the author also returns to her ghost motif here. Deanna has spent her life among the ghosts of extinct creatures, but now, as she brings new life into the world, she must leave these ghosts behind and “commit herself irrevocably to the living.” 

“‘That’s right,’ Nannie said. ‘You call that a scion, or a clone. It’s just the same as the parent it came from. And the other way is if two animals mate, or if two plants cross their pollen with each other; that’s a cross. What comes of that will be different from either one of the parents, and a little different from all the other crosses made by those same parents. It’s like rolling two dice together: you can get a lot more numbers than just the six you started with. And that’s called sex.’

Deanna nodded again, even more tentatively. But she understood. She followed the path through the tall grass that Nannie was tramping down in front of her.

‘Sexual reproduction is a little bit riskier. When the genes of one parent combine with the genes of the other, there’s more chances for something to go wrong. Sometimes a whole piece can drop out by mistake, or get doubled up. That’s what happened with Rachel.’ Nannie stopped walking and turned around to face Deanna. ‘But just think what this world would be if we didn’t have the crossing type of reproduction.’” 

In this quote, Nannie responds to young Deanna’s questions about why her half-sister, Rachel, who was born with Down’s syndrome, turned out the way she did. As she does so, Nannie gives an unusual “birds-and-bees lecture” (390), framing sex in terms of nature and science and describing how every time two parents’ genes are crossed, the result is a unique offspring. Nannie’s explanation reinforces the novel’s main idea that nature consists of an ever-changing, always-evolving variety of life, but there is also a dark side. As Nannie says, sexual reproduction increases the risk that something will “go wrong,” as it did with Rachel. Conditions like Rachel’s are beyond human control, just like the many inevitable processes and shifts of the natural world, and Nannie seems to accept that in this case, humans have no choice but to take the bad along with the good.  

“Nannie put her hands on her knees and looked Deanna earnestly in the eye. ‘That was the world, honey. That’s what we live in. That is God Almighty. There’s nothing so important as having variety. That’s how life can still go on when the world changes. But variety means strong and not so strong, and that’s just how it is. You throw the dice. There’s Deannas and there’s Rachels, that’s what comes of sex, that’s the miracle of it. It’s the greatest invention life ever made.’” 

Here, Nannie articulates one of the most important themes of Prodigal Summer: the idea that sexual reproduction is a “miracle,” the “greatest invention life ever made.” Through a reproductive process that allows life to constantly evolve and adapt, the natural world endures. A belief in this form of reproduction does not preclude religious faith; rather, Nannie considers this procreative process to be part of “God Almighty.” The importance of sexual reproduction plays out in multiple ways throughout the novel: through plot and character arcs such as Deanna’s affair with Eddie, and Lusa’s goat-breeding project; through imagery of fertile, blooming nature; and through the intellectual arguments espoused by Nannie and other characters. By the end of the novel, readers clearly see how the “miracle” of sex is reflected through the entire breadth of nature, and how sexual reproduction becomes another connective thread in the intertwined web of the natural world.

“And this was what she had started: in the absence of Cole, in the house where he’d grown up, she was learning to cohabit with the whole of his life. It was Cole who’d broken out the top rail of the banister as a rambunctious child, Cole who’d built the dry sink in the pantry for his mother the first year he took shop in school. He’d planted every one of the lilacs in the yard, though that seemed impossible because they were thirty feet tall now. His father had made him plant them for his mother the summer he was nine, as reparation for cursing in front of her. Lusa was making progress toward understanding. Cole was not to be a husband for whom one cooked, with whom one sat down to meals. He would be a second childhood to carry alongside her own, the child becoming the man for all the years that had led up to their meeting. She could coax stories about Cole even from people outside the family: women in town, strangers, Mr. Walker. Country people seemed to have many unwritten codes about death, more of them than city people, and one was that after a given amount of time you could speak freely of the dead man again. You could tell tales on him, even laugh at his mild expense, as if he had rejoined your ranks. It seemed to Lusa that all these scattered accounts were really parts of one long story, the history of a family that had stayed on its land. And that story was hers now as well.”

Here, Kingsolver uses the motif of ghosts to portray Lusa coming to terms with Cole’s death. By living with the ghosts of a younger Cole, Lusa has actually come to know her husband in a way she never did when he was alive. Realizing that Cole’s will be a “second childhood” she’ll remember alongside her own, she ensures that Cole’s memory will live on, even as she moves forward with her life. In addition, Lusa acknowledges the importance of “staying on [their] land” for the Widener clan. Lusa’s own ancestors were forced off their land, but by becoming part of the Wideners and their “story,” Lusa has reclaimed her family’s identity as landowners. In addition, with her new life on the farm, Lusa has found her own place, her purpose.