My Brooklyn

There may have been neighborhoods with green lawns, playgrounds, and ballfields a short walk from houses with enough bedrooms for everyone. Houses that stood apart from one another, so owners could park cars in garages set towards the back and then walk on paved walkway to back doors leading to kitchens with modern appliances, but I live with five others in a three-bedroom six-room railroad room apartment fourth floor walk-up in a six-story row tenement house on a block with twelve other buildings, exactly the same. Built-in the late eighteen or early nineteen hundreds. Buildings riddled with cracked walls, leaking ceilings, stuck windows, overflowing toilets, mice, and roaches that were there to stay, with garbage cans 'most missing covers' in alleyways that rats owned after dark, leading, to. Courtyards with ‘No Loitering’ signs posted, where we played hopscotch, hit the stick, marbles, red light green light one two three. Where Valerie’s mom jumped into from the roof to. That summer’s day my mother said that ‘we were moving’.