Melissa Sarno

We battle the stroller through the door, butt and hands and handles and wheels until the door slams us in fast. We press the button that doesn’t light, while Little O shouts ell-ator! ell-ator! Doors open and shut, open and shut, and we’ve made a big deal out of them, these ell-ator doors, so his mouth goes wide into a Home Alone scream-face, until we’re there, we’re in, arranging our stroller inside clusters of other strollers, and he’s nagging at the stroller straps until

We’re on the other side of the BQE, we say when people ask where we live. Over the highway, we say of our neighborhood, this other-world along the waterfront. We’ll always and forever be near Pok-Pok? they’ll ask, or Alma?, but, really, just past the hum of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway; a concrete river snaking like the Arno through Florence. Our Ponte Vecchio is the walking bridge connecting 1st Place to Summit, with St. Stephen’s steeple chin-yanking you into the sky. You

This vignette is about one of my first experiences at the barber shop with my son. It sparked the idea for this little informal vignette series and was published, here, in the New York Times Metropolitan Diary; a happy moment for me. It starts like this: "I stand on Henry Street in Carroll Gardens and look in. The glass door has an authentic barber-pole swirl. As a woman, I am used to fussy appointments at hair salons, having to decide between a junior or senior stylist. But

I’ve decided to write a few vignettes about my daily life in Brooklyn in the next few weeks. Our landlord is renovating the building we’ve lived in for seven years so we’re leaving our apartment in Brooklyn on April 1st. We’ll be subletting an apartment nearby but soon to be homeowners North of the city (more on this soon!) so our move is as exciting as it is bittersweet. In the meantime, I hope to capture what I love about our Brooklyn neighborhood, here. I walk with the bl