Birthday Cakes and Games

What word floats by the window of my mind? 

The view from a window 

is so often the same. 

Houses and trees, maybe a man walking his dog, 

or a woman walking with purpose to work, 

perhaps children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. 

Only the happy sounds of their play reaching my ears.

Each one of these 

has their own story, 

stories that 

I’ll never know. 

But stories that 

belong to them, 

stuck in 

back pockets as 

the man or 

the woman go on

their way through 

the next 24 hours.

And for the children, 

their stories have just begun 

with birthday cakes

and games of hopscotch.

“We do not stop playing because we grow old, 

we grow old because we stop playing.”

~ Benjamin Franklin