QUOTE : I wonder sometimes how I could have ever believed in mermaids. I never would have accepted something like the Easter bunny- I knew too much about chickens and who they let take their eggs away. But I had seen flowers bloom into fruit, like straw turned into gold. I'd seen the way sea anemones seemed to die and be born again with every shift of the tide. I'd found seashells that spiraled into themselves, and my father had told me that those elegant shapes once housed animals. In such a world, mermaids did not seem impossible.