“the fact that three-tiered wedding cakes involve engineering skills I just don’t have, the fact that it’s really Leo who should be making them, wedding cake collapse,”

Our narrator’s thoughts repeatedly return to “mounds:” Julia Child’s mound of onions, the mounds of laundry to be washed, and most often, Native American mounds, like those discovered in her home state of Ohio. Mounds are mentioned twenty-five times in the novel’s first two hundred and ten pages. What is the significance of Indian mounds to the narrator’s thoughts and life?

We know that the author’s husband, Leo, is a structural engineer, and he calls the Indian mounds “a great engineering achievement.” Much earlier though, on page 12, during the narrator’s memories of reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, she thinks about a scene from the author’s “These Happy Golden Years,” when Laura and Almanzo “find an Indian mound when they’re out courting in the buggy.” I looked into this scene from the Ingalls Wilder book, and it seems that her encounter with this “strange” mound causes Laura to see the countryside differently, perhaps adding an element of mystery and unknowability and the realization of a much older civilization with a different relationship to the land.

Being unfamiliar with Indian mounds, I did some digging (pun intended!). These man-made mounds found in various parts of the U.S. and numbering in the thousands are made of combinations of earth, sand, clay, and stone. It is believed they had various purposes: ceremonial, burial, effigies, and as markers for gathering places and other community spaces.

Our narrator specifically mentions mounds located in Ohio, Serpent Mound, Williamson Mound, Alligator Mound, and others, some of which encompass over a mile of land. She thinks about her time teaching history at the local community college where she tried to get her students interested in learning about the local burial mounds, but frustratingly, they were more interested in the Civil War. She muses that archeologists still don’t know much about the mounds, other than they took years to build, were used for over five hundred years, but they remain uncertain about what exactly they were used for.

Of course, we can draw some similarities between the narrator’s use of her hands in the creation of pies and cakes and native peoples’ movement of earth and other natural materials, layering them to create lasting structures:

“the fact that three-tiered wedding cakes involve engineering skills I just don’t have, the fact that it’s really Leo who should be making them, wedding cake collapse, the fact that once I had an avalanche of frosting…”

But perhaps it’s more significant to consider the symbolism that the mounds hold for the narrator’s general outlook. Perhaps her interest in them is a continuation of her mourning for her mother’s death. In thinking about the Hopewell mounds in Chillicothe (where the narrator and Leo spent part of their honeymoon), she recalls the class that she taught “on Hopewell burial customs, with me going on about extended burials, flexed burials, bundled burials and grave goods, cremated, decomposed…” These death rites and remembrance practices highlight the narrator’s regrets about what little she has of her mother’s things, and, that all of those letters her mother wrote to Abby were destroyed. She has respect and admiration for a culture that honors the dead with substantial, physical structures and items, commemorations that feel more substantial, perhaps, than simply her private memories of her mother.