To put events in chronological order means to organize them by their relative timing: we begin with which one actually happened first, followed by the one that happened next, and so on, regardless of the order in which events are presented in the story. In "The Leap," the first event in the chronology is when the narrator's mother, Anna Avalon, saves herself, seven months pregnant, after her flying trapeze act goes wrong. Her husband, Harold Avalon, dies when, mid-act, lightning strikes the central tent pole and brings it crashing down. Anna's daughter, the narrator, describes their act and what happened that day; her mother was taken to the hospital after the accident.
While Anna is in the hospital, she meets the narrator's father and Anna's second husband, a doctor. He teaches Anna to read and write, and she tells him about all the places in the world that...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
she'd visited and he never has. From that time on, the narrator says, Anna has never been without a book. Her child does not survive. Eventually, Anna and the doctor get married and move "onto the old farm he had inherited."
Next, when the narrator (the daughter of Anna and the doctor) is seven years old, the family's farmhouse catches on fire. People try to reach the narrator's window to rescue her, but no one can, and the narrator waits for someone to come. Anna takes off her dress, shimmies up a tree, and leaps through the air onto the house. She taps on her daughter's window and the two jump, together, from the burning house into the firefighters' net.
In the story's present, Anna has gone blind, and the narrator's father has recently died. With "no one to read to her," the narrator has returned home.
The chronological order of the major events in "The Leap" by Louise Erdrich
is as follows. First, the narrator's mother, who is seven months pregnant, and
her husband make their entrance as the Flying Avalons into the Big Top of the
circus. A New England lightning storm brews. The Avalons are in the midst of
performing their finale in which they kiss in midair when a vicious bolt of
lightning strikes the Big Top causing disaster. The mother has a
split-second to make a decision about whose life to safe and whose life to
risk. She grabs a lightning heated cable to save her baby instead of grabbing
her husband and joining him in a death fall.
The mother is hospitalized for her burns and injuries. The baby is born safely.
The mother's New England doctor teaches her to read. They fall in love and
marry. They settle with the new baby in a farm he has inherited. Later, when
the narrator is a little girl a fire breaks out while the mother is away from
home. The babysitter calls her and upon her return she finds the firemen at an
impasse as to how to rescue the narrator from an upstairs window. The mother
strips off her clothes and climbs a tree and leaps from a dangerous limb to the
edge of the house's roof. She digs her heels into the roof's rain gutter, hangs
upside down and smiles at the narrator through the open window through which
she then makes a midair rescue.
Much later, the mother is blinded by severe cataracts. Her husband the doctor
reads to her habitually. His time then comes to die. The narrator, whose own
life has not gone very well, returns home to comfort and read to her
mother.