The [letters] to [my little girl] Odette are filled with little stories she might enjoy: the snowfall that has blanketed [Central Park] like frosting on a cake, the store filled with toys, porcelain dolls and dollhouses she would adore, the pretty dresses in the shop windows.
—Julia Alvarez, The Cemetery of Untold Stories
While the image of Central Park frosted like a cake is pretty, that isn’t what makes this sentence stand out. Its beauty lies deeper, nestled in what she writes to her 7-year-old daughter.
We never outgrow stories of the things we want. Those wants may grow larger, they may shift, but listening to stories of them never gets old. The gold glitters forever even as the jewelry changes.
The stories to a 7-year-old aren’t all that different than a 70-year-old’s; the major difference is in scale. What Alvarez’s character uses as stories here become the building blocks of the larger stories of a later age. These building blocks build even bigger stories, but at heart they stay the same. They grow like a nautilus shell, a home that gets bigger as we do.
A bonus from the same book:
Just like el Jefe, she laughed. He asked what she was referring to. Monte Cristi, 1927, she replied. Before your time.
But you weren’t alive then either, he reminded her.
I was when I was writing her.
Next week: William Blake on how to look at the world.
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