October 9, 2015 - 14:43
I chose the word “green” for the keyword as I read through the book Wild written by Cheryl Strayed. Cheryl mentioned “green” several times trough her story from part 1- the story of her past to the very ending part when she had finished her journey on PCT.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “green” has many origins such as Old Frisian “grene”, Middle Dutch “groene” and Old Saxon “groni” and more. It means the color green, vegetable, Neptune, minerals, grass, the color of signal, fresh, nature, environment, tender, young, safety, unripe, healthy and so on.
In Wild, “green” is the color which Cheryl could feel relationship with her mother. It firstly appears in almost the beginning of part 1. “I was wearing green. Green pants, green shirt, green bow in my hair. It was an outfit that my mother had sewn- she’d made clothes for me all of my life. (10).” Her mother sewed all of her clothes by her hands and those Cheryl was wearing were all green at then.
At this period, in addition, Cheryl was living a life in countryside. She was living a very “green” life. In particular, after when they moved to Aitkin Country, her life was totally environmental friendly “green” life. Their house was the only one on the land and her mother and stepfather Eddie made most of the things they needed for their life by themselves. They had no electricity. They had no access to luxuries. Even when they were doing farming, her mother did not allowed her children to use pesticides and they were bitten a hundred spots of their bodies by mosquitos.
Despite of this extremely “green” life, her mother was dead for a cancer when she was just 44. She was living an extremely healthy life but still she had to die for a cancer. After her mother’s death, which became the biggest grief she had to carry her whole life, Cheryl’s life became totally different from then. She lived in a city, divorced with Paul who laved her and also she loved, joined sex with another guy Joe, took Heroin. During this period, there was nothing related to “green” in her life. She was separate from “green”, rather like a city lady.
However, her life gradually went back to “green” as she started her big journey on PCT. At first, she was just a guest, just a foreigner at PCT, carrying a too heavy backpack which she could not even stand by carrying it at first. Nonetheless, she became wilder and wilder as she reached forward and forward. Still sometimes she went back to a lady who could not help having desires but eventually she was suit to that wild environment on PCT. “I walked east along a lush green corridor, the roadbed of the long-abandoned Columbia River Highway, which had been made into a trail. (308)” This is the last sentence she refers to “green” which is in the very last part of the story. The word “green” which ties Cheryl and her mother appeared through her memoir.
Works Cited
Oxford University. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford Univercity Press, 2015. Web. 9 Oct. 2015.
Strayed, Cheryl. Wild. New York, NY. Vintage Books: 2012. Print.