48 pages • 1 hour read
Judith Ortiz CoferAmerican History
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Old Woman’s Flowers
The old woman who lived in Eugene’s house tended the flowers in her yard until her husband died in June 1963. The flowers symbolize the love and care that the woman put into her home and marriage, which Elena observed and sought to imitate, wanting to “climb down into the yard” and water the flowers that the woman had tended to lovingly for so many years (20).
After Eugene moves in, Elena notices that El Building blocks the sun from shining on Eugene’s house, except for “the tiny square of earth the old woman planted with flowers” (22). It is as though the patch of garden symbolizes hope, particularly for Elena, who admires the beauty and color the tiny garden provides in an otherwise dirty and grim-looking place. Eugene’s father mowing down the flowers is therefore foreshadowing—a loss of beauty and hope that anticipates the end of Elena’s fantasy of living with Eugene as the old woman had lived with her husband.
Gray Snow
On the day of President Kennedy’s assassination, it is “a cold gray day” in Paterson (19). The color gray recurs throughout the story to indicate the city’s grimness and its industrial dirtiness. When Elena and her parents drive through the suburbs of Paterson, Clifton, and Passaic, “where children [make] snowmen in the winter from pure white snow, not like the gray slush of Paterson” (23), the snow also becomes an indicator of class difference. One’s proximity to the purer snow, the kind that Elena watches fall from the sky at the end of the story, is a sign of having the privilege to insulate oneself from the crowdedness and poverty that characterize Elena’s life in Paterson. When Elena watches the snow fall from the sky, she avoids looking at the dirty ground because she is not yet ready to relinquish her dreams of boys like Eugene, patches of flowers, suburban lawns, and all the other markers of a better life.
The Green Door
In contrast to the gray snow, the green door to Eugene’s house is a symbol of nascent hope. This is the entry to the house in which the old Jewish couple once lived. Elena has imagined her and Eugene settling into domestic comfort like the elderly couple, and Eugene’s invitation to study at his home seems to her the first step toward this possibility. This visit also appears to be the first time that Elena has noticed the color of the door (perhaps newly painted), though she has observed his house for a long time. Elena notes that in Spanish the color green is associated with hope, heightening the contrast between the door (along with all that Elena believes stands behind) and her mother’s warning of “humiliation and pain” (26). When Eugene’s mother forces Elena to turn away from the door, closing it behind her, Elena becomes aware of the meaning behind her mother’s cryptic warning: Some hopes may never be realized.
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By Judith Ortiz Cofer
