My Family By Naomi Shihab Nye Analysis

Family is one of the most important factors in many people 's lives. The live of each person and their past shapes the life of the following descendants. Losing an important part of the past can change the lives of the future. Naomi Shihab Nye uses clear description of her great grandfather’s famous mint snowball and the history behind it to share the importance of family heritage and objects of a family member and what they bring to the future descendants. When Nye writes this story, she wants it to always relate to her readers.
At the time that the memory of Nye’s great-grandfather’s was disappearing, so was her family’s heritage. As Nye’s mother took a bite of the snowball, “She closed her eyes to see the Swiss village my great-grandfather’s …show more content…
Can I find any lasting solace in the color green?” Nye is using the river as a metaphor for the narrator 's origins. What the narrator really wants is to trace her family back to where they were originally from. Without the mint snowball, the narrator does not know her heritage because she has no proof. She wants the same feeling the mint snowball brought to her family members, she wants to be taken back to the Swiss village and experience it on her own. Nye wants everyone to have an object that will take them back to their origins and for that object to create an experience for the reader that they can only get by eating it or holding it in their own …show more content…
Losing that main object that was so important in his life was losing the memory of the great-grandfather in the future. With that in mind, the reader can think about their ancestors and stories they’ve heard about them. It’s like a puzzle, they families piece parts of the puzzle together, but without their important object, they will never finish the puzzle, it will always be a mystery. “My great-grandfather had one specialty: a Mint Snowball which he invented.” The one object the family had left of the great-grandfather was the Mint Snowball. This memory was also an important factor to the great-grandfather 's life. The way Nye starts off with, “My grand-grandfather had one specialty” shows this object has significance, it was something that everyone remembered about him. It was an important item in his life where anyone who tasted anything minty, or saw snowfall or even the color green would think of