flipflop_diva

My sister and I look like our dad in pretty much every way. We both have dark brown hair and dark eyes like he does (nothing like our mom’s blond hair and blue eyes). We are tall like him. We have his small lips and the nose that could stand to be a little smaller on all of us. I even inherited my dad’s super fast growing fingernails (which, good for me, bad for him).

My mom used to joke that the only reason she knew we were hers was because she was there when we were born.

A lot of other things about my mom seemed to skip by me in the gene pool lottery, too — for good and bad. So far, I seem to have gotten my dad’s side of the family’s knack for good health. I also am really good at math, just like my dad. But all the crafty stuff that my mom was amazing at? Sewing and painting and crocheting? That passed me by too. (My sister got it all.)

However, there is one very useful thing that I did get from my mom — immunity to the seasickness that plagues my dad and my sister.

When I was sixteen and my sister twelve, my parents took us to Hawaii for summer vacation. At the time, there was a cruise line that operated solely within the Hawaiian Islands. You would board in Honolulu and then spend a week going to the other islands and just enjoying being on the ocean. For a special treat, my parents took us on this cruise.

The day we boarded the ship, my sister and I were in awe. We had never seen a ship so big and so beautiful.

By cruise ship standards today, it was really quite small. It had two pools — a big one and a small one — and a movie theater, but that was about it for amenities. It didn’t even have a casino since it never left U.S. waters. But to us at the time, it was amazing.

My dad came aboard the ship with half his luggage packed with seasick remedies. He had been in the Navy so he knew how bad his seasickness was. My sister and I hadn’t really even been on boats before, unless you count It’s A Small World at Disneyland or the Queen Mary where it sits docked in Long Beach, California.

But that night, as we sat together in one of the lounges after dinner, my sister announced she was not feeling well. My dad took her back to our cabin to hook her up with one of his seasickness bracelets. By morning, she felt fine.

A couple days later, we found a piece of paper under our door when we woke up in the morning. There was a tropical depression — not quite a hurricane but possibly getting there — headed our way. The afternoon, and especially the night, were expected to be rocky.

By the time dinner rolled around, it was getting a lot harder to walk down the halls without bouncing into the walls. I thought it was hilarious and a lot of fun. My dad and my sister did not share my excitement.

After eating a few bites of their dinner, my dad and my sister retreated to our cabin to take more meds and try to sleep through as much of the night as possible.

My mom and I, both feeling perfectly fine, finished our dinner and then went to the theater to see the nightly entertainment.

Once it was over, we headed up to one of the bar areas. We got a drink — a margarita for my mom, a virgin Piña Colada for me — and sat down together to enjoy our beverages and talk about things, just the two of us.

The ship was rocking even more by then. We could hear the wind battering the windows and the sides of the boat. There were only a few people out and about, most hunkered down in their cabins.

We decided we wanted to take a look at the ocean before we headed to bed ourselves.

On one of the top decks, there was a row of glass windows that overlooked the small pool. Past the pool was a small area for lounge chairs, and beyond that were the sides of the ship. We thought if we stood behind the glass that we could see the ocean beyond the pool and the deck area.

We made our way up the stairs and to the upper deck, laughing as we knocked into walls and hung on to the bannister so as not to fall. Once we arrived, we found a couple other people with the same idea as us, so we went to stand beside them and stare through the windows.

It was unlike anything I had ever seen before. As the ship would tilt in one direction, all the water in the pool would rush to one side and then fly up into the night air, practically leaving the pool itself empty. Then the water would drop back into the pool as the ship tilted the other direction, and the water would rush to the other side and fly up into the night air again.

We stood there for what felt like ages, just watching as the water flew up into the night sky each time the boat tilted.

Sometimes, if the boat tilted enough, we could see the dark waves of the ocean, but most of the time, the lights from inside the ship, shining out on to the pool, made it hard to see anything down below.

It was awe-inspiring, though, just realizing the force of nature, and also incredibly beautiful at the same time.

As we stood there, the rain began in earnest, falling almost sideways due to the force of the wind. My mom took my hand as we used our other hands to balance against the windows.

Finally, a captain came over, urging everyone to go back to their cabins for safety reasons. I took one last look at the pool and the splashing water before my mom and I headed back to the bottom of the ship and to our cabin and our snoring cabinmates.

In the morning, the intense rocking had stopped. We could walk down the hall in a straight line.

When we walked by a window, we saw the sunlight reflecting off the ocean, its brilliant blue waves now gently rolling us along.

The tropical depression was gone, we learned at breakfast, changing directions and leaving us be. My sister and my dad were grateful. My mom and I were too, but I’ll never forget that night we had, standing together and watching the power of nature just a pane of glass away.

Non-fiction. This was actually my original idea for the "You Shook Me" topic at Final Six. But then the ice storm came and I was afraid we were going to lose power, and I knew I had a hidden immunity idol I could use, so I ended up sitting it out. But I did like my idea, and thought it was a nice moment between my mom and I, so I wrote it now, and here it is.

Thank you for reading! This was written for

therealljidol: Survivor Idol! We're at the final immunity challenge now, so there's no voting. We just write an entry every day until only one person is left standing.

That said, if you want to read the entries, you can find them all here.