Quotes From Outlined By Dust

Billie Jo mourns that she is like her father in the section, Outlined by Dust. She writes, “He rubs his eyes the way I do…Ma never did that. And he wipes the milk from his upper lip same as me…Ma never did that either”(112). After her mother dies, she and her father are trying to live with one another and fill in the hole left without Ma. Billie Jo is probably thinking about how similar she and her father are because she desperately misses her mother. She doesn’t miss her mother as if she is going on a trip. She misses her like someone old enough to sense the foreboding sense of death, and who knows her mother will never come back. Billie Jo says, “I think I should give them a rest, let the dust rest, let the world rest. But I can’t leave it rest, on account of Ma, haunting”(110).

Billie Jo is haunted by her mother. She is haunted by how much is lost because of her mother’s death. Part of mourning is sweet remembering with a pang of sadness on the end because the person knows that it can never be again. Billie Jo is experiencing that. She and her father are trying to move on, but they also need to remember and get used to that pang of sadness. Sometimes you need to move back to move on. Billie Jo and her father probably also blame each other for the accident. They can’t move past that. Though they don’t say anything, they can sense it in one another. Additionally, Ma was the glue that held them together. They both loved her and it seems like she was taken so quickly. They can’t find her in either of them. Because they can’t find Ma in each other, Ma feels even farther away than ever, and that pain is even worse than only missing her. Billie Jo is thinking of how she is like her father because she feels that her mother and her mother’s ways are slipping out of her grasp and she can’t find a way to hold