by Sage Taylor Richardson

Created on: August 06, 2008

Shannon and I were fourteen and playing "Mermaids" with our little cousin Christina, who happily rode about piggyback while we 'big girls' swam around the pool gossiping about boys. What else do fourteen year old girls have to talk about?

We were the seahorses, of course.

"Seahorses don't talk," pouted Christina, feeling left out of our intense dialogue, which incited a fit of adolescent giggles from the both of us.

"Seahorses don't laugh."

That was it, under the water we went, howling with glee and practically choking on the chlorinated cold water that shot up our noses and into our wide open mouths. Then glimpsing each other's distorted and goofy faces through the aqua bubbles, we laughed even harder. Christina flailed her way out of the pool and ran off whining to my mother and aunt that we weren't playing right. Whaaaaa

That episode was just one of many moments of near hysteria my flame-haired cousin Shannon and I indulged in when we were young. We could guarantee a laugh-a-thon any time we got together. Most of the time, whatever sparked the original giggles didn't warrant the 'fit' (in my mother's words) that our peals of laughter usually morphed into.

One of my fondest memories of unparalleled and nearly unstoppable 'fits' occurred at Short Beach one lovely August afternoon. We'd gone out to the tide pools where I liked to indulge my curiosity for all things natural and find baby hermit crabs and periwinkles, taking them out of the water to examine them before putting them back. I was standing precariously in a tide pool with one foot on a wobbly rock and one foot on a slippery algae-covered rock, picking up baby crabs, looking at them, and depositing them in a smaller pool to count them later. Shannon, meanwhile, sat on a large stone beside me, slapping the water out of her tube sock (why she wore socks to the beach that day is still beyond me) until it was approximately the length of a jump rope and regaling me with more melodramatic boy-crazy stories. She'd nearly hit me in the head with that crazy sock and I was set to grab it and throw it in the churning ocean below when she suddenly stopped dead mid-sentence, stared over my shoulder in what can only be described as horror, and with a loud screech jumped up and bolted back towards the beach proper. Since the tide pools were located along the horns of a crescent of large rocks that hugged the beach, we were effectively hemmed in by deep water on one side and boulders on the other and the only way back

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