Happy Birthday to me

My kids would say I'm blessed. In the past, I would have said I'm lucky. Now, I'm no longer sure what sort of word to use, but whether I attribute it to blind chance and luck or to a higher power, I was born and grew up with a wonderful group of friends.
Just today, I got a birthday card. Granted, my birthday was a month and a week ago, but the best cards have no need to be on time. Their lateness just confirms that someone has been thinking about me all that time, waiting for the right inspiration to write a note. In fact, the card came from one of my neighbors, Jenny, and her daughter, Ashley. When my house was a duplex, they inhabited the other half. Ashley was a freshman when I was a senior, which means I was in third grade when she first got on the bus to kindergarten, a moment I remember well. We played all sorts of games, one that I'm sure Jenny recalls with dread was the "game" when my sister (it may have been me, but I might as well have blame her) decided to unzip the pink beanbag that was a current feature in Ashley's room. That room was the mirror image of mine at the time, and later became the room I called home during high school and on to today, after my dad took on the ambitious project of converting the old mill house into a single-family dwelling. And yet, as terbulent as my room was over the ensuing years, the floor covered with soccer or ski clothes or whatever sort of clothing happened to be in season, papers, books - I never was and still and not what you would call a neat man - yet no matter how much I abused my mother's sense of order, the room was never as joyfully chaotic as it was on that day when Rachael, who could only have been four or five at the time, unleashed an avalanche of miniature styrofoam snowballs from the bright pink bean bag.
They poured out, swamping our version of the peter rabbit board game, and began to run to all corners of the room. As the senior child in the group, older than the rest by four years, I ought to have done sometime. Although I may have organized some sort of half-hearted cleaning attempt, what I remember was how tiny the bits of styrofoam were, so light that they fell in slow motion when you tossed handfuls of them up in the air, and so small that they fit not only between the edge of the hardwood floor and the wall (the molding was not something my dad had gotten to by that point) but into some of the larger cracks between the floorboards as well. Later, with the trusty shop-vac, I realized that they were some of the more difficult cases to dislodge.

To be continued.