In "The Leap," what part of the plot does this sentence foreshadow? "My mother once said that I'd be amazed at how many things a person can do...

In Paragraph 9, the narrator makes this statement: "My mother once said that I'd be amazed at how many things a person can do within the act of falling."

At that point, we already know that the mother survived the circus disaster that claimed the life of her then-husband, who fell to the ground from his trapeze. We know that the mother survived and didn’t fall.

So we wonder why she says that, as if she did have a great fall at some point.

We find out a little bit later. Check out the start of Paragraph 18, where the narrator begins to tell us about the time her house caught fire. She’s trapped upstairs where the firefighters can’t get to her, and it’s her mother who rescues her.

The mother climbs a ladder, and using a tree, makes a leap onto the roof next to her daughter’s window. With her daughter in tow, the mother then leaps off that roof onto the firefighters’ net. Both of those leaps gave her a chance to realize, as she says, that you can do (and think) a lot when you’re falling.

So, the narrator's statement foreshadows the part of the plot where the mother really does take a dangerous leap, even though it was her husband, not her, who took that first dangerous fall during the circus incident.