“My bounce-around life had taught me that dreams were dangerous things—they look solid in your mind, but you just try to reach for them. It’s like gathering clouds.”

Hattie’s experience as an orphan who lives with an aunt who does not love her makes her wary of dreaming that things can get better. Since Hattie lived with several relatives before Aunt Ivy, she also feels skeptical of the possibility of a home being something stable that she can rely on. Larson uses the simile of comparing dreams to gathering clouds to emphasize the futility that Hattie feels in believing in anything outside of her current circumstances.

“I stood watching the train a bit longer, picturing Charlie patting the pocket where he’d placed the wishing stone I’d given him. He was the one who’d taught me about those too. ‘Look for the black ones,’ he’d told me. ‘With the white ring around the middle. If you throw them over your left shoulder and make a wish, it’s sure to come true.’ He threw his wishing rocks with abandon and laughed at me for not tossing even one. My wish wasn’t the kind that could be granted by wishing rocks.”

This quote introduces the symbol of the wishing stone, which Larson uses to symbolize Hattie’s dreams. Hattie’s flashback of Charlie using the stones to wish for his dreams to come true leaves Hattie with a happy memory of him, even though she finds it difficult to wish for things as easily as he does.

“The war—and our enemies—were far away, like Charlie now in France. Surely Mr. Hanson understood that. Besides, couldn’t he smell the cinnamon and apple perfume wafting out from Perilee’s basket? I think even President Wilson would’ve been tempted.”

Witnessing anti-German sentiment leaves Hattie feeling confused. Until this moment, Hattie had compartmentalized the war from her life on the home front, and she does not understand why other people do not do the same. Her confusion is represented through her hypothetical question, and Perilee’s innocence is made manifest in the olfactory image of sweet smells.