Kyler James Mclendon and Kaleb Mclendon, Twins, Age 10, Members of the Harlan County Boys and Girls Club; Harlan, Kentucky:
Kyler: We had to share a lot of stuff and lot of things, you know, that we’ve got. We probably have to spend more time together, than any other brothers and sisters. Yeah. And we share, we used to share a room.
Kaleb: But I moved to live at my grandma’s house.
Kyler: I’m always putting up with him, fussing.
Kaleb: It’s me putting up with fussing.
Kyler: Yeah, I kind of accidentally pushed him in the pool.
Kaleb: With my phone in my pocket. It’s not an iPhone, it’s an iPod. Messed it up. Won’t even turn on any more.
Kyler: Yes, kind of accident. Still got mine. It’s not turned on right now. I loaned it, so you could make a bunch of skins.
Kaleb: He’s loaned it like one time, since it happened, and it happened like three weeks ago.
I play basketball and play X-Box. I like living in the mountains cause there ain’t no tornadoes, hurricanes, and stuff. If they fly out, go up a hill, I can just hide up in the mountain.
Kyler: I like living in the mountains, because of the same thing he does. My favorite thing to do is to play basketball and football, and I like a lot X-Box and sometimes me and Kaleb, we have a trampoline at home, but with a basketball goal hooked up to it, so we can play basketball on a trampoline.
My grandma? Well, she’s kind of loud, on occasion, when him and my brother are fussing. And she gets loud, and then she’s quiet. She’s sick. She gets sick a lot. She takes medicine, medication for her heart, and the medication for her heart is making her hurt in her stomach. It’s bad.
Kaleb: My mamma is seventy, and my papaw is seventy-nine. My mamma can hardly walk and papaw has one leg. The blood circulation wasn’t going to it, so it started to rot, and they had to cut it off.
Kyler: My mom went to jail, when I was seven months, and I was living in Ohio, so when she went to jail they put me in foster care, up for adoption. Well, my mamma got us, all eight (Referring to brothers and sisters) of us.
My dad’s in Ohio. I’m going to visit him, probably in a week. Kaleb don’t like to stay places far from his mamma. He doesn’t like that.
Well, right now we’re all in one house, because my mom, she tore a ligament in her leg. She stepped on a rake, and she can’t walk on it now. She said that she’d have to go to Corbin to get surgery for it.
Kyler: (I want to be) an NBA basketball player.
Kaleb: Same thing.
Kyler: He gonna be NFL and basketball.
Kaleb: I don’t like football.
Kyler: I’m gonna play college football. I’m never gonna play NFL, unless if I’m like hopeful.
Kyler: Kentucky Wildcats! Well, they won. They made it to the championship, and then they made it to the Final Four, and they got beat out by Wisconsin. Then they went through the whole season, and got thirty and 0, first people.
Kaleb: Thirty-eight and 0.
Kyler: The first people to ever make that, and then they tried to make it their forty, you know. That’s the world record up there, and they couldn’t make it to that, because they got beat out of the Final Four. They was thirty-eight and 0 in all. I like Tyler Lewis or Willie Cauley-Stein or Devin Booker.
Kaleb: When I’m around all my family, we’re like all cooking out and stuff… talking, running, and playing.
Kyler: One time Kaleb hit me. I went like this, and my nose started bleeding.
Kaleb and Kyler: Yep, I love soup beans and cornbread and spaghetti.
Kyler: One time Kaleb dared me to put soup beans inside my spaghetti, and then I eat it, and it was good. I mean, you can eat it all.
Kaleb: I don’t go in the mountains.
Kyler: Sometimes I go up there and look around, and go get mountain water and drink it. It ain’t that clean, but another brother and I got a big jug of it, and that water had like dirt all in it.
Kyler: I didn’t go. If I went all the way to the top, it probably would of have taken me like half a day.
Kaleb: I love pizza!
(In regard to taking their photograph):
Kyler: I don’t know. Can we be holding a ball, a basketball?
(In response to my request to put their arms around each other.)
No. Nah.
Kyler: How about I have a football, and he has a basketball. We haven’t done that.
(Second request to put arms around each other.)
Kyler and Kaleb: Nah. OK.