![]() ![]() ![]() But I’ve never lost enough marbles to win this game. I’m drawn to games with the word “solitaire” in their titles-the “debonair” of wallflowers and late bloomers. I’ve won that game loads of times, putting same with same. It is not like solitaire with a deck, where in the end every card is neatly stacked in ascending order in its own suit. None of us at the end of this un-won game are close enough to one another to be leapt over and thereby stripped from the board.įor years, I’ve played this game and not solved it, by which I mean I have not ended up alone. I think: me, my husband, my son, my daughter. ![]() The fewest marbles I've landed with in marble solitaire are four. So far, in my life, I have landed alone nowhere. I don't get attached to which marble I aim to land alone in the center. The game came with all red marbles, but I have raided my son's collection to play with colors and patterns-cat’s eyes, cloudy swirls, speckled eggs, pearls-with a few original reds thrown in. Mostly, it has been a gift from me to me. The game was selected by me for them to give to him. The marble solitaire was a gift to my son from his paternal grandparents several Decembers ago. From the start, every marble in play is hung on it. I start with thirty-three marbles-none in the center well, where I hope to end up, and none in four peripheral wells, creating room for jumping the others and arranging the original marbles in the shape of a fat cross. The wooden board contains thirty-seven wells. That's me-the solitary glass orb who has leapt artfully over all others to land in the center of her life, disposed to survey each once-occupied and now empty well. In this month of feeling together, the game of marble solitaire requires that I end alone, with one marble in the center well. I anticipate a stretch of days without work, and I savor it, set the time aside for play. I listen only to seasonal music and dress the home in ornaments I ignore the rest of the year, wrap in paper and store darkly under the stairs. “This game, Marble Solitaire, that I was drawn to play-that I looked forward to playing all year in that final month I somehow imagined as having all these extra, empty days in it, all this extra time-defined winning as the elimination of all others from the sphere of play and measured my success as a player by how well I ended up alone.”Įvery year, and more often in December, when the circular board joins other festive wooden objects on my coffee table, I try to solve the marble solitaire. ![]()
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