Moleskin 2.5: Botherhood

Four years is as good as a generation apart when you’re five and one. I don’t think we played together much in those first years, in North Dakota and then in New Hope, Minnesota, as Dad finished up his seminary studies. We were on two different tracks: I was learning to read as Dan was learning to walk; I was off on errands with Dad while my brother, with our mother resuming work as an English teacher, was left with the babysitter. I’m not sure how early it was that I began to look back at my brother as an annoying tag-along, but it was a perception that stuck well into our teenage years. And yet in our next station in life, when I was six and Dan was two, we did start to play together more, just as we approached the time Dan could no longer be considered, by me or by anyone, the baby of the family.