On Monday of the week I turn 65, it rains trinkets from my childhood. Rainbow puddles of Tiddlywinks pool at my feet. A hail of acid-orange Nerf Balls bounce benignly off my head. Platoons of green, parachuted army men drip from sickly-white sycamore branches.

Tuesday brings gale-force winds of expletives my parents whipped at one another during the Vietnam and Nixon years. At one point, an especially strong gust slaps the bifocals from my face, and I think for a moment that my mother has been resurrected.

By Wednesday, the sky has cleared into the blue of my father’s one good eye (the other having been clouded useless by shrapnel in Korea). All day long I feel trapped in his gaze, even though both of his eyes have long since turned to dust.

Things fog over on Thursday. The air hangs as heavy as the air-conditioned atmosphere inside our Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon on the annual family trip to Florida when my grandmother would chain-smoke Saratoga 120s in the rear-facing back seat to keep from getting carsick.

Frost gilds the ground silver on Friday. Empty footprints walk off in all directions as if the whole world is inhabited only by ghosts. I imagine generations of dead relatives searching in vain for one more breath to breathe.

Slate-gray shingles of clouds cover the sky on Saturday. I can’t help but think this was what living was like for my father and his father and all the other fathers who worked the underground with the weight of the world pressing down on them daily.

When my birthday finally arrives on Sunday, I can’t bring myself to open my eyes to see what the weather has delivered. So, I sleep the day away, unable to predict whether I possess the willpower to ever rise and step outside again.