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- Roy was convinced Ellen was just another big-city lawyer who’d
made the world into a place where no one accepts responsibility for
their own actions anymore. That it’s always somebody else’s fault,
and that she was going to sue him. What misunderstanding led him to
think this about her?
- In the upstairs room of Gran’s old home in Beacon, somebody had
put drywall over the plaster on the walls. What did it uncover in
the old house? Why might someone have covered up something so
beautiful?
- Ellen chose to stay longer in Maine because she had "uncovered a
window into my grandmother’s life." What were some of the secrets
she uncovered, and why do you think her grandmother lived her whole
life this way?
- Gran taught Ellen that in photography, "the most important thing
of all is composition—what your eye chooses to photograph. What
stays in, what goes out." Did Ellen believe she was right? Why?
- What other hobby did Ellen have that she’d never shared with her
family or her granddaughter? Why do you think she gave it up? Was
photography perhaps another way of keeping that passion alive for
her, as an outlet for her creative side?
- Gran told Ellen that "there are so many different ways to look
at the same thing." Was she only speaking of photography, or might
she have been speaking about other things as well?
- What was the painting of that won Ruth Goddard first place at
the Beacon Festival of the Arts in 1950? Why might she have chosen
that place as her subject? Why did it come to mean so much to Ellen?
- Ellen wondered if "you could ever really get your true home out
of your system." What places were in Ellen’s system, or Gran’s, or
Roy’s? What makes each of us so attached to a certain childhood
home, or the home of a grandparent?
- Why didn’t Sugar want Ellen to have the paintings done by
Ellen’s grandmother? What did Hayden do about it?
- What miniature item did Roy make for Ellen, and what was its
significance?
* Some questions from
Owlcation.
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