When I Was Young in the Mountains

Title: When I Was Young in the Mountains

Author: Cynthia Rylant

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Summary: A little girl explains her story of when she was young in the mountains. She said that her grandfather would come home in the evening covered in black dust from the coal mine, but his lips were clean so he kissed the top of her head. Her grandmother spread the table with corn bread, pinto beans and friend okra. In the middle of the night, she walked through the grass with her grandmother to the “johnny-house”, but held her hand. She promised her grandmother that she would never eat more than one serving of okra again. In the mountains, she walked across the cow pasture and through the woods, carrying towels, and even though they sometimes saw snakes in the swimming hole, they jumped in anyway. It was dark and muddy. On the way home, they would stop for a mound of white butter at Mr. Crawford’s. Mr. and Mrs. Crawford looked alike and they always smelled of sweet milk. The girl would pump water from the well at the bottom of the hill with her brother and heat it to fill the tub for their baths. After the bath, they stood in front of an old black stove, shivering, while grandmother heated cocoa. They went to church in the schoolhouse on Sunday’s and sometimes walked through the cow pasture with the congregation for baptisms in the dark swimming hole. Her cousin, Peter, was laid back in the water and her grandmother cried. They listened to frogs sing at dusk and woke up to cowbells outside of the windows. Sometimes, a black snake came and grandmother would threaten it with a hoe.  If it didn’t leave, she would kill it. One time, four of them draped a snack across their necks for a picture. It was dead. She used to sit on the porch swings as her grandfather sharpened her pencils with his pocketknife. Grandmother sometimes braided her hair and shelled beans. The dogs would lie around them and watch the starts sparkle in the sky. She never wanted to go to the oceans, when she was young in the mountains, and she didn’t like the desert either. The mountains were always enough.

Characters: girl, her brother, her grandmother, her grandfather, dogs, Mr. and Mrs. Crawford

Plot: N/A

Theme: the mountains were always enough; she never wanted to go anywhere else

Setting: moutains

Opinion: I didn’t really understand the point of this story, other than telling the reading that the girl in the story loved the mountains. I didn’t notice any theme of the book, other than the fact that she didn’t want to go out of the mountains.