Today I was sitting in my favorite chair. This chair is low to the ground, soft, a really ugly color but extremely comfortable. It's pushed into a corner of my living room next to a window with a huge curtain. I always pull the curtain over myself and the chair so I feel hidden and mysterious. Anyway, this is pretty much my thinking, reading and writing spot. Whenever I read, I'm there. When I write, I'm there. And this morning I was thinking about what I should write about for my summer project. I figured that I'm already three days into my blogging and I have not even begun to think about what my blog is all about! AKA my summer book.
Now, I have always had some major facination with trees. I love pictures of trees, (ha! My blog background is even a tree). I love relaxing, natural things. So for years I have thought and thought about what a tree could symbolize. In a book that I read this year in my Honors English class, trees played a huge role in the story by what they symbolized. This book was A House on Mango Streeet by Sandra Cisneros. It was my favorite book we read in class over the course of the year. In this novel, Cisneros presents a young hispanic girl living in the outskirts of Chicago. The entire story is about her, Esparanza, trying to find her true home. I also wrote an essay for my English class that involved this book and my theme for it was the difference between a house and a home. I stated that Esparanza has a home, which is the house that she lives in currently on Mango Street, but I also stated that she felt lost--that she didn't belong to the house on Mango Street. The message that I took from this book was that you can be a house that is anywhere with whoever. But a true solid home is where your family is and where you feel safe, secure, and wanted.
Also, in another Mitch Albom book, Have a Little Faith, there is a small part in this book where the main character sees a small girl sitting with her family. I am not 100% positive with how this took place in the book so I'm sorry if this isn't exactly right. He talked with the little girl about not having ahome to live in but the little girl just replied that she may not have a house but she has a home because her family is with her. (or something similar to that. I promise that if I find this part in the book later I will make a posting).
Anyway, back to my original reason for this posting.... In A House on Mango Street trees are symbolic of strength and Esparanza relates her feelings to theirs in the way that they are similar because not the trees nor Esparanza can move from where they are planted. The tree's roots hold them in place as the house on Mango Street keeps Esparanza in place.
I would love to use this simple form of symbolism as inpiration for my summer writings.
A few years ago I began writing a novel about a young girl who's mother dies in a car accident. This main character, Adeline, become depressed, and for no particular reason, finds comfort in a small meadow she finds in the woods in back of her house. It is there that she finds The Maple Tree. This part of the story takes place in the cool, late Autumn season that winter slowly creeps up on. All the other trees in the forest are dead with little to none leaves on them. So Adeline cannot find out why this maple tree is magically in full bloom as if the middle of Spring. It makes her very curious and for some reason she decides to crawl through the hollow trunk. It is now that she discovers this tree is magical because it leads her back in time where she reunites with her presently dead mother. I worked on this story one long afternoon nonstop until I had an addition of ten pages to my twenty I had already written. But my laptop decided to freeze and go into a self shutdown so I lost most of the ten pages. I felt terrible and was crying and just gave up. I have yet to return to writing it. I would go back to it for my summer writing project but I feel as if that's cheating. I feel that I have to start from scratch. I have to start with The Blank Pages of a Determined Writer.
<3 your devoted writer, Bre
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