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The Grandmother
Jennifer Farrell, John’s mother and the old couple’s youngest daughter, dies before the events of the story, but is nonetheless crucial to its impact and to the relationships of her living family. The main characters grieve her in their own ways throughout the story, whether in the form of the grandfather describing her loss to the narrator, the grandparents and John singing a mournful song addressed to “Jenny,” or the narrator thinking about her absence from the house late at night. Her memory makes possible some of the most profound moments of emotion and connection in the story. However, like the narrator, hers is a narrative of emotional alienation; the reader learns that she attempted to bring John with her to Toronto, much as the narrator imagines bringing him to the Midwest, but that both of them were so unhappy she sent him back to Newfoundland and his “real” family.
Jennifer Quotes in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
The The Lost Salt Gift of Blood quotes below are all either spoken by Jennifer or refer to Jennifer. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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The Lost Salt Gift of Blood Quotes
“John here has the makings of a good fisherman,” says the old man. “He’s up at five most every morning when I am putting on the fire. He and the dog are already out along the shore and back before I’ve made tea.”
“When I was in Toronto,” says John, “no one was ever up before seven. I would make my own tea and wait. It was wonderful sad. There were gulls there though, flying over Toronto harbour. We went to see them on two Sundays.”
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Here, the narrator listens to John’s grandfather—Jennifer’s father—talk about the boy. This quotation underlines not only the importance of cultural heritage in John’s life and bond with his family, but also the symbolic resonance of gulls in John’s relationship with his mother. The old man’s observation that “John has the makings of a good fisherman” indicates that he intends John to carry on the family business of fishing once he has died or is no longer able to fish, integrating him more fully into the culture and tradition of Newfoundland and the village. In addition, it suggests the emotional significance Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum
“When she married in Toronto […] we figured that maybe John should be with her and with her husband. […] Well, what was wrong was that we missed him wonderful awful. […] Like us had no moorings, lost in the fog or the ice-floes in a snow squall. Nigh sick unto our hearts we was.”
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In this passage, the grandfather explains how much he and his wife missed John during his brief stint living with his mother, Jennifer, in Toronto. This passage reflects the complexity of the family’s relationships and, once again, fog appears as a representative of distance, both physical and emotional. Until this point, the grandparents’ conversation with the narrator has been brusque and unemotional, and this is the first suggestion of intimacy between the narrator and the old man, when they are able to overcome the gulf between them and discuss their feelings honestly—or, at the very least, the old man is Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae volup
“Well, it was all wrong the night before the going. The signs all bad […] But still I feels I has to go. It be foggy all the day […] And I says, small to myself, now here in the fog be the bad luck and the death but then there the plane be […] soon he comen through the fog […] Powerful strange how things will take one. That night they be killed.”
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This quotation—which is also from the grandfather’s description of John’s visit to Toronto, his return to Newfoundland, and Jennifer’s subsequent death—uses the symbol of fog to render the restoration of John and his grandparents’ relationship, as well as the permanent severing of John’s relationship with his mother. The grandfather says to himself that “here in the fog be the bad luck and the death,” suggesting the serious and painful harm that distance and alienation can cause, and thinks that John may not be on the plane, implying a fear that he will not be able to reconnect with John after Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor aspe
“Jennifer Farrell of Roncesvalles Avenue was instantly killed early this morning and her husband James died later […] The accident occurred about 2 A.M. when the pickup truck in which they were travelling went out of control on Queen St. W. […] It is thought that bad visibility caused by a heavy fog may have contributed to the accident. The Farrells were originally from Newfoundland.”
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This quotation is an excerpt from the newspaper clipping the narrator reads about Jennifer’s death, describing how she died and the heavy fog that caused the accident. This is the point at which the narrator first learns about Jennifer’s death, the loss of his original connection to the family and to Newfoundland. Both Jennifer’s death and the fact that the narrator has only now learned about it reaffirm his distance from the family, an alienation symbolized, like John’s, by the “heavy fog” on Queen St. West. Jennifer’s death has irreparably distanced John from his parents, and it has also distanced Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. U
I stand and bend my ear to hear the even sound of my one son’s sleeping. […] I hesitate to touch the latch for fear that I may waken him and disturb his dreams. And if I did, what would I say? Yet I would like to see him in his sleep this once and see the room with the quiet bed once more […]
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In this quotation, the narrator approaches his son’s bedroom door after going upstairs to bed, remembering that it used to be the bedroom of his ex-lover, Jennifer. Here, the reader first learns that John is, in fact, the narrator’s son, which has been implied but never explicitly stated before. Only at this point, when the narrator must make a final decision as to whether or not he will attempt to take John back to the Midwest with him, does the reader discover the reality of how John is related to the narrator. As the narrator is distanced from the only Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accus
Once, though, there was a belief held in the outports, that if a girl would see her own true lover she should boil an egg and scoop out half the shell and fill it with salt. […] In the night her future husband or a vision of him would appear […] But she must only do it once.
It is the type of belief that bright young graduate students were collecting eleven years ago for the theses and archives of North America and also, they hoped, for their own fame.
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In the middle of the night, hovering outside of John’s bedroom, the narrator thinks about an old folk belief. This quotation reveals, obliquely, the circumstances of the narrator and Jennifer’s relationship, as the narrator is remembering the time he spent in this house 11 years ago. At that time he was a “bright young graduate student” spending time in Newfoundland to study local folklore and ballads, and became Jennifer’s lover, implied by the reference to the belief allowing a girl to see her “future husband.” The indirectness of the narrator’s admission, his only acknowledgment of what took place in this Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi nece
And perhaps now I should go and say, oh son of my summa cum laude loins, come away from the lonely gulls and the silver trout and I will take you to the land of the Tastee Freeze […] Again I collect dreams. For I do not know enough of the fog on Toronto’s Queen St. West and the grinding crash of the pickup, and of lost and misplaced love.
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In this quotation, the narrator concludes that the right decision is to leave John with his grandparents, friends, and community in Newfoundland, rather than take him away to the Midwest—“the land of the Tastee Freeze”—and attempt to resolve the alienation between them. He invokes the gulls as a symbol again, describing them as “lonely” and thereby suggesting his own alienation; John, earlier, found comfort and community in the gulls, and their dissimilar reactions indicate their diverging relationships with Newfoundland, its nature, and its culture. This distance, leaving them incapable of truly understanding each other, is what the narrator acknowledges in Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus te
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Jennifer Character Timeline in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
The timeline below shows where the character Jennifer appears in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
...Eventually the old man begins to tell the narrator about John’s trip to Toronto after John’s mother ’s marriage. He explains that he and his wife thought John would “[have] more of...
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The old man shows the narrator a newspaper clipping describing the deaths of the Farrells, Jennifer and James, in a car accident on Queen St. West in Toronto. According to the...
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