8 Images

1) "Through the observation window, they watched the gray wall of water twenty feet high move up the canal toward town" (97). This image paints a picture of the two men alone in the tower watching the giant storm move in.
2)"the kind of dodge people later likened to a fast quarterback barely scooting around some bullnecked lineman"(98). I think its obvious the picture this paints and i think it is used perfectly to show the behavior of the storm.

3)"with it cam a low humming in my head-a sound like a crazy cello player sawing the same note over and over, or like a zillion bees coming up from the ground"(103). This shows a vivid image of how Mary feels when she suffers from insomnia.
4)"She was carrying a sketch pad the size of a small card table, like she was planning to draw the fisherman, but I knew with cold certainty while I stood there in that lukewarm water that she was climbing up there to get drunk" (109). This quote is not the most descriptive but i think it creates a good image of Mary's ill feelings toward her mothers increasing use of alcohol.

5)"The head's a translucent globe about the size of a softball and full of air, so it floats on top of the water, clear in places, but full of sunset-type colors in others-royal blue and red-violet, the colors bleeding into each other"(112). This literally is descriptive enough to give u a mental image of what the man-o-war would have looked like lying there on the beach.

6)"and I remember a few times dancing around the kitchen in my nightgown with my bare feet on his steel-toed boots, both of us sliding around in the yummy cloud of whiskey he was breathing"(126). this shows the while Mary's dad may have been absent and a drinker, he did love his daughter and was somewhere within himself a good guy.

7)"Then she would bawl like a sick cat, hanging her head in her hands, blowing her nose on toilet paper, and saying that we didn't understand, and that it wasn't our fault she was crying"(132). This shows a very sad depressed mother that is completely overwhelmed by her life and combats this with massive amounts of alcohol.

8)"Then mother breaks loose from daddy to stamp her foot at the group of kids, and they scatter like buckshot into their own dark yards. and that's it, that's what i remember about my birthday"(139). You can really feel like your watching this happen. You can see the intoxicated mother, the father trying to control her, and Mary realizing that her birthday was not what she had hoped which is reminiscent of her life.