Marble Warfare

Upon receiving a little mesh bag of matching marbles each year on my birthday, I would reverently pour the new recruits into the metal canister to join their fellow marbles. Though they tried to integrate, their shared spots, stripes or sparkles still identified which batch they came from. These visual distinctions inevitably fostered the formation of clans whose rivalries transformed the hallway carpet to a battleground. We consider ourselves lucky that they never crossed paths with “the budgets,” Daddy’s old marble tribe named for the used cardboard box he stored them in whose great staircase migrations earned them great honor.