Contrast Essay Intro 1

After my birth in Helena, Montana, my parents brought my sister and I to downeast Maine. I was six months old, my sister seven. Maine is home for me, will always be, but my sister believes Montana is hers. So odd, how two sisters, even if we are only half, identify with two different states. Two very different states. Montana is dry and arid with mountains rising up so far I thought they were going to rub across the bottom of the plane the first time I went back. I looked for the ocean, holding my sister's hand tightly, asking her, "where is it? Where is it?" And then the rodeo, a real rodeo, where the cowboys didn't put up their outfits after the show as though they were only costumes. "I don't get," I told my mother while we sat in the stadium and she looked at me as if she were ready to take me home. "It's cowboy country," was all she said. I didn't care what kind of country it was, I needed the raw stink of the mudflats and the sight of men hoisting their traps in bright yellow slickers.