"Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favourite...There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;And frogs in the pools singing at night,And wild plum trees in tremulous white
A characteristic that the author could be trying to show us might be that the wife really loves nature and could be the one who decided to make the nursery represent nature.
In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran incircles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distantsteaming river
Bradbury though out this story uses a lot of visual imagery.
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, itsnerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in thescalded air.
Bradbury characterizes the house with typically human descriptions. It sings, sighs, disposes of waste with a “metal throat,” shudders, and shakes its “bared skeleton” in the heat of the fire.
The nursery walls glowed
Could the wife/mother be pregnant when the incident happen?
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened.
Was this the family's dog?
Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in aphotograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in onetitanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, andopposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.
This reminds me of the photos from the nuclear bombings in 1945. When the bomb detonated the family was all outside. Based off the date that the house announced I can assume it was pretty recent since they were all outside and the children weren't at school so it was probably summer.
off to school, off to work,
Children and adults?
Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city ofAllendale, California."
It’s set in California and in the future.