Roads
Ruth recounts, “It seems that my grandmother did not consider leaving…And though she never spoke of it, and no doubt seldom thought of it, she was a religious woman. That is to conceive of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost is put." The allegorical road underscores the impermanence of life. Life has it eventual destination like the road; hence, the grandmother is comforted with the belief of life being parallel to a road which has an assured end.
“Escaped and Entered”
Ruth explains, “through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother’s house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it. It was he who put us down in this unlikely place." Here, the allegorical "escaped" relates to Ruth's grandfather's demise. The emblematic "entered" denotes Ruth's birth which ensued after her grandfather's expiration. So Ruth's assertions about his grandfather are based on stories because she did not meet him.
