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Chapter 15
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
The next morning, the doctors release Gram from the hospital. Gramps wants her to stay another day, but Gram is too “cantankerous.” Sal figures that fear is making them all cantankerous. She slept in the waiting room, and the boy stayed in the waiting room with her. At 6:00 a.m., the boy woke Sal up to tell her that Gram was better. Then, he offered Sal a piece of paper with his address on it, in case she wanted to write. He added his name—Tom Fleet—and left.
Sal is already learning to look at her own behavior through different lenses, depending on what other people have to say. Gramps might be calling Gram “cantankerous,” but Sal recognizes that Gram isn’t the only one who’s frustrated with this turn of events. Sal is, after all, still hearing the wind telling her to rush—Gram’s snakebite is scary, but it’s also slowing them down on their trip.
Themes
As Gramps checks Gram out of the hospital, Sal suggests they call Dad, but Gramps refuses—he doesn’t want to worry him. But Sal is ready to talk to Dad. As she and her grandparents leave the hospital, Sal hears a familiar bird warble coming from some nearby poplars. Suddenly, Sal thinks of the “singing tree” in Bybanks. Sal explains that there’s an aspen beside the barn in Bybanks. As a kid, she often heard a beautiful birdsong coming from the top of the tree. She could never see the bird, so it seemed like the tree itself was singing. Just after Dad learned that Momma wasn’t coming home, he left for Lewiston, and Gram and Gramps came to stay with Sal. Sal spent the day waiting for the tree to sing, and she, Gram, and Gramps even slept under it. It never sang.
Once again, something Sal encounters in her present immediately jolts her into the past. The singing tree emerges as a symbol of Momma. Sal and Momma had a shared love of and connection to nature—it was a source of wonder (and perhaps even magic) for them. That the tree didn’t sing after it became clear Momma wasn’t coming home suggests that Momma’s absence completely altered Sal’s world, depleting it of the joy it once had. In this way, Sal depended on her mother for happiness and didn’t know how to create it for herself.
Themes
Back in the present, Gram hears the birdsong and exclaims that it’s the singing tree. She says this is a good sign. Gramps gets back on the road, headed for the Badlands. The whispers Sal hears stop telling her to hurry—in fact, they tell her to slow down. She can’t figure out why, though it seems like a warning. But Sal doesn’t have much time to think, since she resumes her story about Phoebe.
Hearing the singing tree suggests that Sal is starting to recover and figure out how to be happy and appreciate nature again. And while this might be a good thing, it also seems disorienting for Sal. Hearing the whispers telling her to slow down suggests that some part of her doesn’t want to find closure and move on from Momma.
Themes
