42 pages • 1 hour read
Deesha PhilyawThe Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 5 Summary: “Snowfall”
Rhonda and Arletha, two women in a relationship, wake up to snow and ice each day of the winter in the city where they live. Neither of them is used to this type of weather, having both grown up in the South. Arletha has a teaching job at a university in the city, and Rhonda works a clerk job at the courthouse. There is tension between them on the morning that the story takes place. Arletha is longing for home (Georgia) and brings it up to Rhonda the night before. It seems to make Rhonda sad or bitter, because of the neglect her family showed her back home; she also reminds Arletha that her home is wherever they are together.
Arletha lists the many things that they both miss about living in the South. She says that they lost all of those things when she and Rhonda chose each other. Arletha reflects on her relationship with her mother—she was very loved, but as a teenager, she didn’t know if her mother would love her the same if she knew about her sexuality. Arletha’s relationship with her mother is strained because of her choice to be with Rhonda and move away. Her mother still calls occasionally, but there is still distance between them, and she won’t talk about or ask about Rhonda.
On the tense car ride to work, Rhonda and Arletha sit in silence—Rhonda was hurt by Arletha’s question about moving back home to the South the night before. After dropping off Rhonda, Arletha finds parking by her university, gets out of the car, and slips on ice. She gets back in her car and begins to cry. She almost calls her mother, but she instead calls Rhonda in tears and explains what happened. Rhonda tells her “must be nice” when she explains that she almost called her mother (Rhonda’s mother kicked her out of the house when she was a teenager).
Later, Rhonda apologizes to Arletha by surprising her with a re-creation of a southern buffet–crab legs, corn, and potatoes; nostalgic music is playing on the speakers, and they eat their nostalgic feast together. She tells Arletha that it’s okay with her if she calls her mother whenever she wants. Arletha reminds her that there is not enough room in her mother’s heart for both of them.
Story 5 Analysis
This short story explores the concept of home, what a home is, and if it can be redefined or recreated. It seems that Rhonda has gone through the process of establishing her new home, both physically and metaphorically. She lives in a new city and has no plans of moving back to her hometown in Florida. She hasn’t looked back because she now lives in a place where she can be fully accepted for who she is and “she vowed never again to be anywhere she wasn’t wanted” (85). She agreed to move with Arletha when she got a job at the university, and tells Arletha “you are home, Lee Lee” (85).
It is clear, though, that Arletha is at a different point in coming to terms with her new life. Home is what she grew up with—the warmth and her mother and all things Southern—and she misses it. She tries to find the same type of feeling with Rhonda in this new, cold, icy place, but it’s difficult to settle into. The nostalgia and desire for familiarity keep gnawing at her.
At the same time, Arletha knows that her new home with Rhonda is better suited to her life, and she really is happy with Rhonda. People are more accepting of her queerness and her decisions in the city, whereas that aspect of her identity is looked down upon in her hometown and by her mother. Arletha loves and misses her mother, but she knows that her mother can never fully accept her for who she is and who she’s with because of the values she adopted from the church.
The snow represents change and the persistence of nostalgia; it is a phenomenon that seems to bring up feelings of displacement and of missing home. The snow is persistent, and it is always there every morning when Rhonda and Arletha wake up. Every morning, they have to go outside before work, shovel their walkways, scrape their car, and clear the way for them to move forward with their day. Each day is a challenge for Arletha to face her new reality and the fact that things may never be the same as they once were in her hometown. The story ends saying that the snow “will fall all night, and tomorrow, we’ll again do its bidding” (94). Arletha experiences the same thing with her thoughts of home. In this way, the snow represents the oppression that gay people still face. They can’t live freely where they’d like and struggle to find a sense of belonging with religious family members.
