Game of Tradition

Game of Tradition
Originally uploaded by Jean 1

Jean 2 and I brought our plenteous brood (seven kids between the two of us) together for a "playdate". Yep, they visited and we played. After all, the day was all about the kids! Or so we kept telling them and each other. But somehow, we managed to find plenty of time to talk, laugh, tell stories on each other, drink coffee and play Uno. What started out as a visit limited to three and a half hours turned into nine hour stay when Jean 2's previous commitment was canceled for the evening leaving the night wide open.

Uno, our game of choice, has almost always been a part of our visits since we were in high school. We used to have this notebook with scores that we kept running for years, we were somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. There's something magical about Uno. It transports us to her little bedroom in town with the blue bedspread and tapes of George Strait and Keith Whitley. It carries us to the side of the t.v. watching Roseanne (when it was a NEW sitcom) and cracking up at her raw humor and relating WAY TOO WELL. It is our game. We've played it with other friends, we played it with our kids, I've even played it a time of two with my husband (where did he learn those weird rules?????) but nothing is quite the same as playing the game with Jean 2. No rule discussion, no argument about who is supposed to play after a draw four + red draw two + yellow draw two+skip+reverse+reverse+skip+4! We just play. And talk. And reshuffle the deck. And talk. And eat M & M's . And talk.