Games

Holidailies has this prompt today:

Let's talk about games (console games, board games, role-playing games, live action, any sort). Do you play any? Do you have any family favorites? Are there any you just can't stand?

Now, there's a prompt a day late. (Since I talked about tennis just yesterday.) However, games, yeah I have plenty to say on that subject. The winter holidays make a lot of people think about football, but it makes me think about board games and jigsaw puzzles. It's a family tradition in my extended family especially on my dad's side to play a board game or card game or domino game while recovering from eating too much or while having an after dinner piece of pie and coffee.

My favorite game is Scrabble. I love words so this isn't that surprising. I remember Scrabble first from playing at my aunts' house. These two aunts never married and they lived together in this little bungalow in Oak Cliff in Dallas. I spent time with them sometimes in the summer, just me visiting them. They had an original Scrabble game and for years it came out and my Aunt Wynnie would play with me (and others if there were other visitors for a Christmas get-together or something). My Aunt Mary, my dad's oldest sibling, would sit in her chair and offer advice and mediation over words. We did resort to the dictionary for conflicts as well.

My mom loved nothing so much as getting out a game or a jigsaw puzzle and whiling away hours on a holiday after the dishes were done. She liked a steaming cup of black coffee by her side, too.

My sister still clings to the memory of those times and insists on getting the Scrabble set out when I visit with her. In fact, the picture above might have been taken after playing with her. I made 'singe' out of sing and (with the help of two blanks) used seven letters for 'culture' thus getting an extra 50 points. I always win when we play. (Well, usually. There are bad draws.) It doesn't matter to my sister. She's back to reliving our childhood. When there were no electronic games or iThis or iThat. When, as we got older, there weren't really toys. But we always had games. We evolved into playing a domino game called Spinners and some other games (one was called Sequence). But just this last summer I visited with my sister at her daughter's house. She brought along her Scrabble set and a Scrabble dictionary. And insisted we play.