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Chapter 1, "The Sign"

• NOTE: Citations in this Lesson Plan refer to the following version of the book: Strout, Elizabeth. Anything Is Possible. Random House, 2017. Hardcover edition.

• Anything Is Possible is a collection of nine interwoven short stories, each featuring a different protagonist and linked through character associations.

• The first story in the collection, “The Sign,” focuses on Tommy Guptill, an elderly man driving into town to buy his wife Shirley a birthday present for her upcoming eighty-second birthday.

• The author gives many flashbacks in this story, as well as the other stories, to establish back-stories of each character. The flashbacks in this story come through Tommy’s recollections of his past while driving by the site of his former farm.

• Tommy Guptill is the former owner of a dairy farm.

• Tommy blames himself for the loss of the dairy farm.

• The fire started near the milking machines and...

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