Hair (Symbol)
Both Chanhassen and Norma Winterbottom cut their long hair before changing their lives by leaving their families. This could be as a subversion on their part of gender norms and the expectation that women have long hair. In Chanhassen's case, there's the added pressure of her husband John loving her long hair, and her daughter Sal's especially long hair, which she grows specifically to model herself after her mother. For Norma and Chanhassen, cutting their hair is a way for them to create distance between the version of themselves they're trying to leave behind, and the version of themselves they're trying to forge by starting a new chapter in their lives.
The Brick Fireplace (Symbol)
When Chanhassen leaves, John chips away at the plaster wall in their Bybanks house until he discovers a beautiful brick fireplace. For Sal, the fireplace is a symbol of stories nested inside of other stories. She uses the example of how behind Phoebe's story is the story of her own mother leaving home. At the end of the novel, Sal even suggests that there might be something behind the fireplace, because behind her story is the story of her grandparents' life and love.
The Singing Tree (Symbol)
There are a few moments in the story, at various points in her trip and in one memory from Bybanks, when Sal describes birdsong emanating from a tree. In these moments, the birds are obscured by the leaves in the trees' canopies, and Sal likes to believe that it's not birds singing, but the trees themselves. When she visits her mother's grave for the first time, she experiences a moment like this. She says, "The birdsong came from the top of the willow and I did not want to look too closely, because I wanted it to be the tree that was singing" (268). These singing trees symbolize Chanhassen. Chanhassen loved trees—she kissed them and hugged them—and was named for the sugar of a maple tree, so Sal naturally associates her mother with trees and believes that if the trees are singing to her, it is her mother's way of communicating from the afterlife.
Blackberries (Motif)
Blackberries are everywhere in this novel. They're introduced as a trigger for Sal's memory of her mother, and over the course of the narrative, the appearance of blackberries and Sal's subsequent reaction to them allows the reader to track the process of her healing and coming to terms with the loss of her mother. When Sal goes to the Winterbottoms' house for the first time, Norma has just made a blackberry pie. Norma offers Sal a slice, but Sal declines, because the thought of eating blackberries reminds her of her mother, and it's difficult for her, at this point, to be reminded of her mother.
Sal and Chanhassen used to pick blackberries together at the farm in Bybanks and eat them with breakfast. Sal has a distinct memory of watching her mother kiss a tree in their yard and leave a dark, blackberry stain on the tree from her lips. When Sal went out and kissed the tree, it tasted like blackberries. She writes about this experience in her journal, and the other kids make fun of her for kissing a tree, but when she visits Ben's mother with Ben at the psychiatric hospital, she and Ben share their first kiss, and Ben says he thinks it tasted like blackberries.
Finally, after Norma introduces Mike to the rest of the Winterbottoms, Sal arrives home to discover that Ben has gotten her a pet chicken and named it Blackberry. The chicken is a link to her farm in Bybanks and her mother, but when she brings the chicken back to Bybanks, it also becomes a link to her life in Euclid. This signifies a change that occurs over the course of the novel. In the beginning, Euclid is totally negative in Sal's eyes. It's a place she wishes she could leave and forget. But Euclid is where she works through the loss of her mother and gains new friends, and there, the symbolic resonance of blackberries expands to include her memory of living in Ohio.
The Marriage Bed (Symbol)
Every time they stop at a new motel on the road, Gramps pats the bed and proclaims that it's not their marriage bed, but that it would do. Sal explains that Gram and Gramps's bed in Bybanks is special because it is the bed where Gramps and all of his siblings were born. It was their parents' bed, and when he and Gram got married, during the reception of their wedding, Gramps's father and brothers brought the bed into the house they'd built together for Gram and Gramps. The bed symbolizes a personal history that accrues through objects that bear witness to major events in a person's life—in this case, Gramps. Of the bed, Gramps says, "That bed has been around my whole entire life, and I'm going to die in that bed, and then that bed will know everything there is to know about me" (78–79).
