Love and/or lack of love affects all people differently. Lack of love can cause guilt and make some people feel unwanted. Love can make us understand that those around us are more than strangers, they are the ones who truly protect us even in the darkest moments. Mary Hood's story “How Far She Goes” tells us some of the ways love can affect people. The story begins with the grandmother taking care of her granddaughter, because the granddaughter's father can no longer take care of her. Grandmother and granddaughter often do not see eye to eye and for this reason they argue and sometimes abruptly leave each other's company. The granddaughter is the first to show how the lack of love, in her mind, on her part the grandmother has a flashback to a moment after the birth of her daughter. She talks about how everyone thought she was joking about the baby and fed him hay, but for her there was no love for this baby she had. Her daughter Sylvie grew up without her mother's love and became a rebellious child, resulting in a child out of wedlock. The grandmother felt guilty for not feeling love for her son and carried him with her every day. The grandmother was afraid that her granddaughter would end up the same way, she could already see that she was on that path. Grandma loved one thing in her life, her little dog. She brought the dog with her to work at church and loved him more than she thought she could love anything else. On page 282 it says: “…the little dog found her. You could count on him. He barked the whole way and squealed when she wiped the drool from his ear. He felt something for this dog that he couldn't feel for his son, part of me feels like this also contributed to his guilt towards the whole thing. He says, “One theme I got from that segment of the story was sacrifice, because they had to sacrifice themselves to save the girl and the grandmother.” The grandmother sacrificed the thing she thought she loved most to save herself and her granddaughter. , the dog. This to me was the effect love has on a person. The grandmother loves herself or her granddaughter so much that she was willing to sacrifice the dog to save them from the bikers, in the darkest moment. No one can imagine what it was like for the grandmother to make such a sacrifice, to kill the only thing you felt you had a connection with to save someone who seemed to want nothing to do with you At first it seems absurd that the grandmother would do something like this for a rebel like her granddaughter, someone who doesn't care she goes with the older kids, a person who talks back, someone who threatens her, and someone who makes the readers feel like when she was being lashed before, by her grandmother, the granddaughter actually felt those things. Then, if you think about it, the granddaughter she got angry because she felt her father wasn't there she wanted, she left with those older kids because she was angry, and he actually doesn't really hate her