The Grave

Katherine Anne Porter's "The Grave" is a story of childhood innocence that many people can relate to. In this story Miranda seems to be the main character, even though it is told from a third person point of view, you can see that she was the person being followed. This story starts off telling the story of a woman who moved her husbands dead body around to different cemeteries while she tried to find a place where she herself would like to settle after death. After her death in Texas her land is sold which moves her husband yet again next to her in a public cemetery. When her grandchildren, Miranda and Paul are out hunting they stumble across the empty graves of the past.

Inside these graves they find "treasures" that fascinate them. Paul takes from Miranda a dove shaped coffin screw, which he declares as being rare. Paul gives Miranda a gold ring that he had found. Being a girl who is always scolded for wearing overalls rather than dresses at some points, she finds joy in the ring. The ring makes her want to put on a nice dress with a sash and sit under a tree in a wicker chair. The ring represents a kind of lifestyle to Miranda that she knows is out of reach, since her father was shorted on the family will and her mother has passed away.

Miranda is too distracted by the presence of the gold ring on her finger to continue hunting, and Paul kills a rabbit he finds to have babies in her stomach. He puts the babies back inside the dead mother and hides it in a bush, making Miranda promise to never tell of what happened. Miranda keeps her promise, and one day enters a market street where suddenly all of these memories are brought back to her of the day her and her brother were still youths looking for adventure. But what sticks out most is the way her brother turned the silver dove over in his hand.

I think that the purpose of this story is to show how much meaning a small thing can have to a child, and how childhood memories of innocence are most clear in times of excitement. Miranda and Paul were excited to have found such simple things from the past in a hole in the dirt where their grandfather had once been burried. Porter shows in this story that no matter where your station is in life you can find small things to make you happy. While Miranda is happy with a gold ring that makes her seem more girly than what she would prefer to be seen as, she is excited and wants to look pretty and enjoy being a girl. Enjoying the smaller findings in life is something that everyone should take the time to do, no matter how busy your days are.