Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls"

I enjoyed this initiation story and watching the narrator grow. It was interesting the two separate ways they used the phrase "only a girl". At first she found the phrase derogatory, you can tell in the phrase, "A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment". She hated the word "girl" at this point, but at the end she found the phrase rewarding.
Throughout the whole story Munro did an amazing job using personification. The first use of personification that caught my eye was when the narrator described the outside that her and her brother were not afraid of. She says, "...when snowdrifts curled around our house like sleeping whales and the wind harassed us all night, coming up from buried fields, the frozen swamp, with its old bugbear chorus of threats and misery." This along with the imagery used kept a mental image of every moment that was being discussed during this story.
I remember playing that game of don't touch the ground. I'm sure most kids did. I always thought as long as my feet were under the blanket I was safe, that was my "rule".
The change and the rebellion this narrator goes through seems similar to John Updike's "A&P". Both this narrator and Sammy go through that same moment of change. When the narrator from "Boys and Girls" left the gate open out of nowhere and Sammy from "A&P" decided to quit. Both were impulses, and their consequences were not thought about.