A homemade dessert, an old card game and a reminder of what hospitality can do.
After an amazing dinner at a couple’s beautiful home on Monday night, we slipped downstairs to their sectional and played a game Clarissa and I had never heard of: Authors. It’s an old card game with the deck of cards showing an author and four of his or her books. Then, in Go Fish like fashion, you take turns calling for various cards you need. You win by collecting the most sets of four books by each author.
Twain, Dickens, Shakespeare, Alcott and nine others are all waiting inside the game for players to discover and collect their works.
“Do you have ‘Little Men’ by Louisa May Alcott?” Clarissa asked one of our hosts for probably the third time, which told me she was close to having all the books by Alcott.
“Nope, go to the library.” (Our little catch phrase we used instead of saying “Go fish.”)
“Ugh.”
Little did she know I had just drawn “Little Men” myself. Now I was the one collecting Alcott.
“Do you have ‘Little Women’ by Louisa May Alcott?” I asked her.
“You had ‘Little Men’?!” She handed over “Little Women” with a look that usually tells me I’m in trouble. Although, that’s not really true.
“I just picked it up.”
The joke was on me, though, because she didn’t have all three of Alcott’s other cards. She only had two, so one of our hosts snatched all three away from me for the complete set.
The evening was exactly what Clarissa and I needed. Good food, laughter, catching up, more laughter, learning a new card game – it was all such a relief from the stresses of everyday life, especially as caregivers.
Getting away from the house when you are responsible for the needs of others who live with you feels so necessary sometimes. The couple who invited us excels at hospitality. Even though they are much younger than me, I want to be like them when I grow up, opening our home to friends to offer a reprieve from their own stresses.
We never turned on the television that night. But at one point, one of the hosts turned on worship music that played softly in the background, setting the perfect tone for the evening. They served us homemade apple crisp with a scoop of vanilla ice cream for dessert. It makes my mouth water just thinking about it.
Before we parted, they handed us a brand-new deck of the same card game we had been playing. I don’t think they planned that, but what a great parting gift.
Maybe that’s how hospitality works. A couple opens their home to you, and you leave inspired to open yours. Hopefully, we’ll soon be telling our future guests to go to the library.
