Carter 1

Alison Carter

Mr. Bigelow

English 10

3 October 2018

I look at the tiny, white blobs sprinkled across the sky, then to the completely oblivious

people scattered on the ground. They’re all in their own worlds, focusing on the stress and

constant expectations in their heads. If they just stop and look around they would know. Know

how much is passing them by. Know the beauty and thoughts of those tiny, white blobs. How

they are arranged to show pictures and stories of the past. To some people stars mean stars, but to

me, and to a girl like Esperanza, they mean opportunity. An opportunity to get out of the

repetitive, gross job life can be.

Esperanza knows how to live with her eyes. This everyday girl, living on a street with

everyday people, looks for the beauty in usually bland things. Now, this girl is actually a

character in a book, Sandra Cisneros’ ​The House on Mango Street.​ She may be fictional, yet I

find myself paying attention to the little moments in life to find joy, just as she does.

Esperanza sits by her window at night and connects to the life of Mango Street. She sees

the trees with pointy elbows like hers and notices a story. How the trees “send ferocious roots

beneath the ground” and “bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger” (Cisneros

74). This girl sees more in these trees than most people on Mango Street do, and I think that

gives her a special connection or even a distraction from the life everyone else is living. She

finds comfort in these trees, they give her hope that she shouldn’t stop growing.
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By my window, I like to listen to crickets chirping in unison when life gets me all sad.

Once the sun goes down, they all start playing their symphony. Every single little bug making

the same sound at the same time, never missing a beat. Sometimes stopping to lay on my floor

and listen to what they have to say can ease my racing brain. They give me hope that I shouldn’t

stop going.

Not only can Esperanza find joy in little things like trees, she can find out a lot about

people by just paying attention to their life. Connections and relationships with people are some

of the greatest things that make life meaningful. Esperanza knows a lot about a man named Earl:

“I can hear when Earl comes home from work. First the click and whine of the car door opening,

then the scrape of concrete, the excited tinkling of dog taps, followed by the heavy jingling of

keys”. (Cisneros 71). Esperanza notices the simplest things about Earl, which can sometimes be

the most interesting. Esperanza knows Earl by sounds, not by what he’s told her.

One time I met a person through her house.

Once I entered the house, I already knew all about the woman who had once lived there.

There are no limits on what is sold at an estate sale. The boxes of cereal the woman ate that

week: for sale. The shampoo inside her Pepto Bismol colored bathroom: for sale. The clothes

right out of her closet: already sold. Just last week she was probably eating corn flakes while

watching The Price is Right, now there are people walking all over her house buying her life.

I never once met this lady, but somehow I did. I never asked her what she did for a living,

yet I knew she was an artist with her own works hung throughout her house. I could have gone

on with my day without knowing that this lady who paints lives down the street. But I went. I
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decided to go because I was bored, and now I eerily know so much about her life. I payed

attention to her knick-knacks and found a whole story.

I don’t like when things get repetitive. That’s why I try to find surreal times. The crickets

won’t crick the same every night, you’ll always see different constellations in the sky, and the

woman in the house down the road sure won’t die everyday. I don’t want to work, eat and sleep

my life away. I feel Esperanza is the same way, and she notices these things in order to escape an

everyday cycle. She doesn’t want a mundane life, and neither do I.