From a Caterpillar to a Moth

From a Caterpillar to a Moth

Jessica Maness

09/24/05

The short story Moths in my mind is a story of how a brash young girl gets instated in to the adult world. The experiences that she has at her grandmothers house takes the life that she is living and brings it back down to earth and shows her that it’s not always about her there are other people around her.

The story starts by being about her. She has hands that are larger than girls her age, not letting her do the things that most girls her age does in the time of the story. “I just couldn’t do the girl things that they could do. My hands were too big to handle the fineries of croquet or embroidery and I always pricked my fingers or knotted my colored threads…” (p. 194) By not being able to do those girl things her resentment of her sisters grew from just resentment to physical resentment when she became violent with the people that teased her about her hands. “So I began keeping a piece of jagged brick in my sock to bash my sisters or anyone who called me bull hands.”(p. 194) she was also so disrespectful that her mother could only handle her until the afternoon when to keep her from fighting with her sisters and then because of the fighting getting whipped by her father, she would send her to her grandmother’s house.

When she is at her grandmothers house it is like she is a new person. She doesn’t fights with anyone or disrespect anyone. Her grandmother meets her on the front step and they get to work transplanting plant starts from mayonnaise jars to coffee cans on her step. The porch becomes an entrance to a new world for her. When she is in her grandmother’s house it’s the same as when she is on the step. It’s like she is learning from her grandmother even though there are few words that are spoken between them. Its as though her grandmothers house is a release of all the tension that she has from the teasing of her sisters and her own hatred of her big hands. Then when she goes home everything that was released at her grandmother’s house comes back and she goes back to her old self and the cycle starts over again.

In the beginning you think that she is not going to change but when she is asked to move in with her ailing grandmother we now know that things are going to change for her. The hands that she is teased about at home now become tools that are useful in helping her grandmother. “And it seemed only fair that these hands