c a l l a h a n

Summer is nice.

This weekend is the first time in a long time that my brother and I are both home and there are four people living in this house. I know how happy this makes my parents, especially my mother. Given my track record for getting along with my brother, I usually prefer it when we’re not both home at the same time, especially since we usually have to share my car. But now he has his own car that he drove home from Colorado, and we’ve actually been getting along really well.

Tonight I went to see Up with my parents, and when we came home, began the task of bringing all the trash and recycling down to the end of our impossibly long driveway. When he heard us, my brother came bounding outside to help. I had just started walking down the driveway with two bags of newspapers when I heard him say, “I have a GREAT idea.” A moment later, he went whizzing past me on his longboard, a bag in each hand, and went flying down the driveway while my dad laughed from the garage and my mom, already at the bottom and sorting everything, started howling that he was going to kill someone or fly right into the street. As I followed in his wake, I could smell smoke from a fire in someone’s yard nearby and heard kids yelling in the neighborhood behind ours. When I was growing up, I took nights like this for granted, thought that they would always keep coming, in succession. Now that I know that they won’t, and that we won’t always be here, I realize, for what seems like the millionth time in the past year, that it isn’t really fair that its not until I’m too old to appreciate moments like this that I actually do.