A woman in Ohio once mailed her mother forty-one birthday cards over forty-one years and received, by her own count, thirty-eight of them back in a shoebox after the funeral, kept, not out of sentiment exactly, but because throwing away a card felt like a small failure of character. The box of assorted birthday cards under review here operates on the same principle, several generations removed: cards for a fortieth, a sixteenth, a just-because-you're-one, accumulated from drugstores over a decade of other people's occasions and never quite used, never quite discarded. Some are addressed in pencil, on the inside flap, to nobody in particular, held in reserve for whichever birthday sneaks up first.
The box itself is unremarkable, a shoe-sized container repurposed from its original cargo, its lid slightly too small from years of being pried open in search of something with a dog on it, nothing too mushy. Cards toward the bottom have gone soft and faintly damp-smelling, having survived at least one basement flood; cards near the top are crisp, recently added, glitter-adjacent. The committee notes that no card in this box has ever technically expired, since birthdays recur with the reliability of tides, and a card meant for a sixty-year-old will serve just as well the following decade, provided nobody looks too closely at the Happy 60th already printed inside.