I never learned to be much of a poker player. In school the game we played during lunch periods or at other odd free times was spades, about which I remember very little. No matter. Another game sticks much more in my memory, and it’s one that I still play on occasion with family and friends: hearts.
It was my mother who was the prime instigator of this game. She had been brought up to go on no extended trip without a deck of cards, or two, and even though she had learned to play bridge as well, hearts was the game she chose to shuffle into our family’s game time. Because we played a number of board games at home, this usually meant that our most frequent and intense hearts games occurred when we were on some road trip or other, on our way to visit relatives or national parks or other sites of historical or scenic interest: the Wisconsin Dells, the Ozarks, Mammoth Cave, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Peter Friederici is a writer and a former itinerant field biologist and tour guide who in his spare time directs the Master of Arts Program in Sustainable Communities at Northern Arizona University.
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