Meet Me in the Garden

Papa’s easy chair is a symbol of Odette’s unprocessed grief and her determination to preserve her late father’s memory against her mother’s erasure. By having the chair taken to the street, Maman attempts to discard Papa’s very presence from the family’s home. Odette’s immediate rescue of the chair is an act of defiance against this betrayal, securing a physical testament to her father’s life. Her subsequent struggle to capture the chair in a painting becomes a manifestation of her artistic and emotional impasse. Fueled by a desire to find an outlet for her anguish, she wonders, “What else to do with this fire in my chest?” (9). However, her early attempts to paint it fail because the grief is too raw and immense to be contained on a canvas at that time. The “splotchy and crude” results reflect her inability to give form to the magnitude of her loss and anger at this point in her life (9). Ultimately, the protagonist’s decision to incorporate the chair and Papa into her masterpiece, Meet Me in the Garden, honors his continued importance in her life. As a symbol of the immense grief that Odette must process before it can be transformed into art, the chair marks a starting point in Odette’s journey of using Creative Expression as an Emotional Outlet.