Simone

When I think of my sister and my mother together, especially when we were little kids, my initial gut feeling is jealousy. When Julia and I were small, it always seemed like they were sharing some special secret that I was almost a part of...but not quite. The photo I've attached illustrates this pretty well, Mom and Julia are engrossed in a starfish pulled from a tidepool, and there I am mostly cut out of the shot. Thinking back, this feeling of jealousy is pretty normal sibling-rivalry stuff: they shared their own special world, and that made me feel like an outsider. I'm sure in the same way, my mother and I shared our own world, and Julia was left out. My sister and I had our own secret world too. There were times, it seemed, that we had extended shimmering moments of the worlds fusing together, particularly when we were away from our home and having "adventures" - especially when those adventures involved tidepools. When our family would take our once or twice yearly trips to Mendocino, our mother would try to plan it so we would be there for a minus tide, when the water is even further out than usual and it was possible to explore the further reaches of our tidal territory. She would wake us up in the early early morning and hustle us down the stairs that hugged the cliffs under the cabin we stayed in. Once we were down on the rocks, our mother always managed to scare me because she was the risk-taker, feeling her way farther and farther into the tidal zone searching for the elusive 18-legged sunstar or cluster of abalones. I was far too much of a scaredy-cat for that sort of thing, and stuck to the tidal pools closer to shore. Julie always seemed to me to occupy the middle ground between our mother's adventurous spirit and my more pragmatic attitude. She was willing to follow our mother to the outer edges of the tide pools, but not without trying to get me to come along, too. Sometimes, with her encouragement, I would actually find the courage to make the leap into the unknown.