A Seven Letter Day

There it was, the first play of the afternoon. I drew S-U-G-E-T-N-O. So play S-U-N or maybe G-E-T-S. Oops. Aha!

T-O-N-G-U-E-S! All seven letters used! Wow! Plenty points! Not only doubled, for first play, but a bonus of 50! Believe me, I don't have this happen very often. But my luck didn't hold. Mom caught up and I drew a Q at the tail end of the game, long after all the U's were used up & guess who won. Not me.

On Sundays, I don't do much walking. Instead, I visit with my mother at a local retirement home; we usually play two games of Scrabble. (By the way, in the picture below, Mom is the white hair, I am the mousey one. She's 102. Half-way to 103. Me? Guess.)


As I was saying, we play Scrabble, twice a week. Despite the fact that Mom's eyes are getting thoroughly macularly degenerated. Despite the fact that Mom's memory has really started flaking.

Her Scrabble game is not too bad. She may forget the day of a doctor's appointment or what she had for lunch -- but she recently learned that "D-A" is a word, per the Official Scrabble Dictionary. A new and very useful 2-letter word? Not something she's likely to forget.

Her game vocabulary still includes such goodies as D-O-R (her definition, "a clicking beetle"...the OSD says "a European beetle") and T-O-D (nothing to do with Tristan & Isolde dying on that boat deck, but, rather a "bushy clump" or a "British wool measure.")

And she unerringly spots the double and triple score squares when she works out her words -- even though sometimes I have to remind her to multiply her scores.

One improvement we made to the game is a special set of tiles we ordered from a site specializing in practical gizmos and thingies to help deal with low vision, among other physical problems.

Take a gander at this amazing lady on her 102nd birthday last December. The day she stops wearing earrings that match her stylish outfit is the day I'll start worrying. I am truly blessed in my mother.