Oh Brother...

Dearest Darling Readers,
So, like all siblings, my little brother and I don't always get along. When we were younger, we actually fought a lot more than most siblings, that we knew, anyway. But now, being older, not only have I realized that my brother and in fact had some good times in our childhood, but we have become a lot nicer to each other as we got older. Unfortunately, we have also grown apart.

I am writing this post today because, in these last few weeks of the summer in Michigan, my brother and I have been spending a lot of time together, a lot more than we have recently. Since I turned about 13 or 14 (and he was 11 or 12), we have grown a lot further apart. We hardly ever talk when we're home, and we never do stuff together anymore. So these last couple of weeks have been really great. We've been doing lots of things together, mostly without fighting, like we used to.

When I was three and my brother was one, my family moved to Sweden. There, we didn't know anyone at first, and therefore were forced together by lack of friends in this new country. I can still remember stealing all of the junk food in the kitchen and trying to feed it to his toy dinosaurs. I remember shoving a banana into the mouth of his rubber snake, and being amazed when the banana was actually going down its "throat" (I later realized that there was a hole at the back of the snake's mouth). I remember the game that we played for years, where he was a dog named "Gutch-Gutch" and I was his owner.

When we were a bit older, we were still close, though we fought more and more often. We built blanket forts in my bedroom every other week and slept in them every night, until, eventually, one of us would kick the other out. We would try to play board games but one of us would accuse the other of cheating and quit the game. Eventually, we got to the point where, for quite a few years, we couldn't stand being in the same room together for too long.

But even through those tough years, we still had our brother-sister moments.

Now, these last few weeks, we've spent nearly every minute together. We've been watching movies and playing board games and card games and having Nerf fights and tubing and swimming and kayaking and playing badminton and volleyball and tennis and playing on playgrounds and eating and playing mini-golf and, most importantly, battling Yu-Gi-Oh cards.

One of the best memories I have of my brother is playing with our Yu-Gi-Oh cards almost 24/7 for several months. Like most fads, that period passed, but I can still remember how we bonded by fighting over who got the blue-eyes white dragon (eventually we came to have two, though :-P).

So even though about half of my relationship with my brother has consisted of animosity and nothing but anger and frustration towards each other, when I'm older, and even now, those times have begun to fade, and what I truly remember are the times where we were best friends.

~Book