Summary

Kingsolver writes epistles of memories of her mother throughout her life in "Letter to My Mother." The first anecdote describes the first time her mother left for a week when she was three years old. She wonders how her mother could be happy at the beach without her. She brings her mother cut sweet pea flowers from her mother's garden that she had been painstakingly trying to grow. Her mother cries and says thank you. When her grandmother days, she tells her mother she does not want to die and her mother tells her that she does not know what Heaven is like, that it might be full of beautiful flowers (163). When she turns 13, she asks her mother to name one particularly good thing about being a woman and her mother replies, the love of a man, being taken...