My Sister and The Hungry Dog

Borrowed from Cristin Carole via Facebook.
I'm 13, Cristin is 21.  She often took me to bars for photo booth snapshots.

I have three sisters that span two families and two generations.  My oldest sister could easily be the mother of my youngest sister.  In fact I could also be the mother of my youngest sister.  My oldest sister is not related in any way to my two younger sisters; people may call my sisters half-sisters.  But that makes no sense to me at all.  They are my sisters, through and through, wholly.

Black Boy

Visitors acknowledge the wooden blocks, the cool red car that zooms at the lightest touch, comment about the water blocks and ask what the light panel is for.  I wait for people to say something about the elephant in the room.

This said elephant?  

Dear Virgil

My older sister Cristin always kept a journal. Because of her, I wrote my way through my tweens and my teens, confessing my life to a diary with the name Virgil.  Why Virgil?

I have absolutely no idea. I stopped writing to Dear Virgil when I went away to college and life shifted from the written word to the typed word.  That meant I stopped recording my life in the writerly sense.

Last month my mum reminded me that I am thirty-something (in the same breath she also reminded me to take better care of my elbows).  I'm a mama myself now.  Raising Levi has made the sunny days long, the seasons fast.  The milestones, big and small stones are fast piling up, and I have been chasing after those "stones" in a scatterbrained way: Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook.  Those are all the awww moments.

So the camera Douglas gave us me is the impetus for this blog.  Brooklyn Sweet Brooklyn is far more significant and succinct than Dear Virgil.  As I record our life, including the aww and the ehhh and even the eww moments, I will not forget why I chose the name Brooklyn Sweet Brooklyn.