Loose Leaf Notes

“The word ‘cicada,’ for example, stops me in my tracks. Sorry, I simply cannot continue.” ~ Billy Collins on choosing poems for a poetry anthology.
Colleen: If I put a blank on a double letter score and a blank is worth nothing, how many points is that?
Mara: Nothing
Colleen: But is it twice as much as nothing?
When Mara and I play Scrabble there’s a lot of laughter and flipping of notebooks as we write down lines we can’t believe we just said. You’d think we were pair of comics instead of poets.
Mara’s nine year old daughter and her friend are arguing. They can’t decide whether to jump on the trampoline, play with my doll house, play pool, or Yahtzee. Mara, who is trying to figure out what to do with an all-vowel rack of letters, stops to listen to them work it out. She looks serious but doesn’t stay that way for long.
“It’s meant to be funny,” she says before reading me the latest poem she’s been working on. It reminded me of something Billy Collins might have written and did make me laugh, especially when she spoke the words “cheap black umbrellas.”
“I just like the word umbrella, the way Billy Collins doesn’t like the word cicada,” I explained when she asked me why I laughed at that particular line.

I make Mara bubble and squeak and a venison burger for lunch. She brings me a pinch bowl that she made while visiting her aunt who’s a potter. There’s a matching small cup that says RED (for my last name) with a triple spiral like the one that’s framed in my bathroom and the one tattooed on her back.
“When I was a girl it was my chore to hang the family laundry. While doing it I would pretend that the only clothes I had left were the ones I was hanging because the rest were burned when the house caught on fire. What if the words on the board were the only ones we had left to communicate with?” I suggest.
After we decide that all filler words, words that aren’t nouns or verbs, could be used freely, we try it out.
I’m glad I’m not injured … Are you Coy? .. Are you coy daily?
“Hey, there’s a new word in the Scrabble dictionary: Zacation!” Mara announces.
“Does it mean you have to go to New Zealand or some place Dr. Seuss wrote about?” I answer.
After that and for the rest of the game, every time Mara says (shouts) the word “zacation,” she giggles.
Do you think there’s such a thing as Scrabble endorphins?” I ask her. “You know like a Scrabble high? I’m serious.”
But just like if we had smoked something while we played; everything seemed much funnier in the moment than it does to me today. I guess you just had to be there.