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Chapter 11
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Walk Two Moons, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Judgment, Perspective, and Storytelling
Parents, Children, and Growing Up
Grief
Nature
Summary
Analysis
For the most part, Gram and Gramps sit quietly and listen to Sal’s story about Phoebe. But when Sal tells them about the message “Everyone has his own agenda,” Gramps says that’s so true: everyone is concerned with their own worries and expects everyone else to worry about the same things.
Gramps, at least, is able to listen to Sal’s story and apply some of its lessons to his own life. He suggests here that a lot of people are so wrapped up in their own realities that they fail to consider that other people might see things differently. This is the mindset that Phoebe (and, to an extent, Sal) falls into.
Themes
Later, when Sal talks about Ben asking after Momma, Gram and Gramps give each other a look. Gramps says that once, his father ran away for six months—and when Gramps’s best friend asked about it, Gramps punched his friend. Then, when Sal mentions flinching at Ben’s touch, Gram turns around and kisses Sal’s hand. Gram also regularly remarks that Phoebe is just like her old friend Gloria.
Both Gram and Gramps are going out of their way to show Sal that they’re listening and empathizing with what she went through. Gramps has also experienced a parent leaving, so he has some idea of what it’s like to cope with that grief and trauma. By telling Sal about his behavior, he shows Sal that she’s not alone in lashing out.
Themes
Not long before they hit the South Dakota border, Gramps heads north toward the Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota. Gramps insists this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but Sal just wants to keep going. Pipestone is in a dark forest that smells like Bybanks. It feels a lot like Bybanks, too. At the monument, Sal asks one man if he’s a Native American. The man explains that he’s a person—an American Indian person. Sal says she is, too.
At Pipestone, Sal gets to connect to nature the same way she did in Bybanks, as well as to her Native American heritage. Pipestone doesn’t feel so different from home, and other people here have similar ancestry to Sal. This man, at least, also feels the way Sal and Momma do about appropriate terminology, which shows Sal that she’s not alone in her opinion.
Themes
Sal, Gram, and Gramps watch “American Indian persons” making pipes out of stone. Outside of a museum, there’s a man smoking a peace pipe. He gladly passes the pipe to Gramps, who takes a puff and passes it to Gram. Gram passes it to Sal. Sal kisses the stem, since that’s what it looked like Gram and Gramps did. The smoke makes her feel foggy. As she lets it out of her mouth, her brain says, “There goes your mother.” Gramps buys two pipes in the gift shop, one for him and one for Sal.
Peace pipes are sacred objects for many tribes—so Sal using one here is a way for her to spiritually connect to her Native American heritage. Her thought about Momma perhaps implies that on some level, Sal knows Momma isn’t coming back, and she’s trying to make peace with that fact by symbolically releasing her. The way this moment unfolds also suggests that connecting to her Native American heritage and to nature will help her connect more with Momma as well as heal from the trauma of Momma’s departure.
Themes
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Gramps gets them a room at Injun Joe’s Peace Palace Motel for the night. By now, Sal is used to Gram and Gramps’s bedtime routine. Every night, after they climb into bed, Gramps says, “Well, this ain’t our marriage bed, but it will do.” This is because Gramps’s most precious belonging is his marriage bed, back home in Bybanks. All of Gramps’s brothers were born in that bed, as well as all of his children.
Again, though Sal’s focus is on her own story and Phoebe’s story, she’s hearing her grandparents’ story along this road trip as well. Learning Gram and Gramps’s story and noticing their eccentricities allows Sal to get to know her grandparents better, effectively humanizing them in her eyes.
Themes
The story of the marriage bed starts when Gramps is 17. He met Gram that summer. Gram was young and wild, and Gramps followed her for a full three weeks. He finally asked Gram’s father to marry her—and Gram’s father said he could, if he could get Gram to stand still. When Gramps asked Gram to marry him, she asked if he had a dog. She wanted to know where the dog slept and how the dog greeted Gramps when he got home at the end of the day. Gramps admitted to singing his dog a song sometimes while he held her. At this, Gram said she’d marry Gramps: if he’d treat a dog that well, he’d treat her even better.
Gram and Gramps’s story establishes that Gram and Gramps have been kind, honest people their entire lives, not just in as grandparents to Sal. And just as Sal is currently learning about her grandparents as she tells them about Phoebe, in this story, Gram learns about who Gramps is by hearing how he treats his dog. In this way, both of them rely on storytelling to discover new perspectives.
Themes
Three months later, Gram and Gramps got married. During those three months, Gramps, his father, and his brothers built a house in a meadow. It didn’t have furniture by the time the wedding rolled around, but that didn’t bother Gramps. After the wedding, during the supper, Gramps noticed that his father and brothers were absent. He figured they were planning to kidnap Gramps to drink whiskey—but instead, when Gramps later carried Gram into their new home, he discovered the marriage bed. His father and brothers had moved it during the supper. Sal wonders if she’ll ever have a marriage bed like her grandparents.
Gram and Gramps’s marriage bed shows Sal what’s possible in a romantic relationship and gives her something to aspire to. She has alluded to trouble in her parents’ marriage, so it's possible that Gram and Gramps’s relationship is a more stable example for her. The fact that Sal seems to hope to one day have a marriage bed like her grandparents shows that she’s starting to think about growing up and becoming independent from her parents.
Themes
