Analysis and interpretation of: “My mother and her sister”:

“My mother and her sister” is a short story about enjoyment of life. The story is written by the first person narrator, who has just lost her mother. We never hear that is a woman, but I assume she is because she is feeling guilty in connection with aunt Lucy. Her approach on happiness with a happy marriage, seems to be feminine. A man wouldn’t care that much about serving a food. Lucy is the sister of the narrator’s mother. Luce is 75 years old. Lucy was married for 49 years but now she is a widow and she is a mother for five children. All her life she used to be a home mom, who made homemade jam, knitted for the children and always made homemade dishes for the family, waited a daddy who came home from work. The narrator’s mother was different from her sister, she learned her children to live them life with free view on life: “We learned from our mother that nothing is more important than your freedom, and that familiarity breeds contempt” (line 13-14).Lucy after her sister’s funeral stays with the narrator. Now Lucy has become elder and her view in life completely changed, she do the same things every day, she doesn’t like to talk, eat healthy food, to go out: “She doesn’t like the rain and refuses to go out, even shops.” (line 36-37). The narrator things that owe to Lucy because she and her brother Tim spent most of the summer holidays at her house with her boring children. But they didn’t had other chose to spend holidays somewhere else. Therefore she want to do the best for her aunt, tries to talk to her but Lucy looks like ignoring her: “But she’s self-contained and silent, she’s composed.” (line 40), she reads recipe books and tries to learn to make good healthy food made from fresh products, but Lucy just taste a little and leaves it. All these days while the narrator was staying at her aunts home was really sad because it was raining all the time and she was upset of the Lucys mood and non-stopping rain. Finally the rain has stopped. And the narrator decides to prepare a food she use to eat. She serves a frozen British soap with some wine. Lucy she likes the food but wine more. After second bottle of wine they started to chat about the narrators mother. Until this evening they wasn’t talked about it, Lucy thinks that Dorothy-her sister was eternal optimist : “She was an optimist. She kept looking forward. Thinking she would find real happiness.Love.Something like that. With all her boyfriends” (line 94-95). When the narrator and Lucy stars to talk about Dorothy the narrator discovers that Lucy life is not such a success as it seems to be. Lucy tells that her husband and she is was not so happy, that they had just understanding of each other. She opens with her secret love story. Luccy tells that she was in love with another man. She met him in the library, thought to know about him more but stopped because she knew that this man would become boring and usually. Therefore it may seem that Lucy does not believe in enjoying her life. She wasn’t really happy with her husband, but she always looked like she is happy. This may be a reason why Dorothy never found a love or maybe found, but never told do anybody about it because she always compared her life with her sisters successful family life.