My cousin just uploaded a bunch of pictures of us when we were kids onto a facebook photo album.

Funny how surreal my childhood is in photographs.

There's me... five or six... in a pink swimsuit that I don't remember, my mouth open like a wide-mouth frog, posing with jazz hands for a group picture as my brother tries his hardest to escape.

There's pictures I don't remember being taken; pictures of the epoch, the year I was thirteen.

My cousin was there for those pictures, in all his freckled glory, happy, only two years before we would lose him.

My legs were toothpicks--in jorts. I wore jorts that year.

My sister was the blondest she'd ever been.

Bittersweet years, my childhood. There was so much I just never figured out back then.

And now... well, I get older all the time. It's bittersweet and fun and tomorrow it will include some form of alcohol.