Every time the family moves, Jeanette’s precious rock collection dwindles. With every beloved stone she leaves behind, she is leaving a little piece of herself. Despite a less than perfect life, Jeanette had her collection of beautiful geodes and crystals to harness her pride. Not only did these rocks act as a small ray of light in her otherwise dull life, but they were the one element of her life that would always be stable. While packing up their belongings to embark on another spontaneous relocation, her father insisted that she could “only bring one” (Walls 90), and leave the rest of her rocks, and hope, at
“It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives is beauty” (Walls 38). As the Walls family travels through the desert to the location of their next home, they stop and stare at a beautifully deformed Joshua tree, with its branches morphed as if it was reaching into the sun. Similarly to themselves, the tree was a victim of a supposedly horrible past bent and twisted by sharp desert winds and scarred by fierce sand storms. The Walls were mesmerized by the tree, merely because it was a glimpse into their own lives-they were emotionally withered from memories of a tough past, yet they still looked in the direction of hope. The Joshua tree signified hope, in that both the Walls family and the tree were not thriving, but still existing.
While I agree with you to an extent on Jeannette's rock collection symbolizing hope for a better life, I also see its dwindling number after every move as a symbol of the family's lack of stability. Everyone, not just children, need some kind of stability in life, something that is constant. They need to have a kind of reassurance that not everything is moving at a fast paced speed that they can't catch. With every move Jeannette's rock collection loses another member, and what started out as, say, twenty rocks, lessens down to ten. It seems to set the standard for what life in general has to offer Jeannette, because if her childhood rock collection can't survive, how is she supposed to hold any kind of faith in the world outside of her family? As for your connection with the Joshua tree, I honestly could not agree more. In short, all of the Walls kids can be seen as this tree. They share common background in a way that symbolizes their struggles both internal and external that molds them into what they are today--which one way or the other, they made it still standing.
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