I never know what kind of memory I might trigger when I dig into a drawer at my house. Yesterday I found a mishmash of things in a drawer: a box of little scented tea lights in aluminum cups; two boxes of birthday candles with a box of holders; a card with two 4-watt bulbs; a Santa Claus ornament; a clear glass ash tray with some tiny Christmas tree light bulb replacements; a card of cup hooks; a map of western North America mountains; a list of the members of a dulcimer group that once met at our house, and numerous manuals for everything from a VCR to a back massager.

The clincher, however, was a stack of paper strips held together by a rubber band that broke when I touched it. Suddenly a picture came bright and clear. For a second it seemed like just yesterday. I saw my family—husband, son, daughter, grandsons, and granddaughter (just kids then), gathered around our dining room table. A game was about to begin. There were several dictionaries on the table. Everyone reached for a pen and one of the strips of paper my daughter and her daddy had cut in preparation for the fun ahead.

“Look what I found in that drawer,” I said to my daughter who was in the living room working on a crossword puzzle. She instantly knew what that fistful of paper strips was. She’s never surprised at what turns up in a drawer in my house. We remembered how much fun we’d had when the game was a favorite past time at family gatherings. The kids actually nagged us to play. None of us ever tired of competing in this game of words. The point was to make up a believable enough definition of a word we had never heard before. That definition had to be good enough to convince the other players it was the correct meaning. Of course, we adults delighted in the fact that it was not only stretching our imaginations, but that of the kids as well. It also tested the scope of our vocabularies. I hoped it was teaching the grandchildren what fun a dictionary could be.

Well, the results of some of those made-up definitions were hilarious. Everyone took a turn calling out a word he/she had found in the dictionary that he/she thought wouldn’t know the definition. Then everyone wrote his made-up definition on a strip of paper. The caller read them along with the correct one and the others had to choose the correct one. Sometimes the made-up definitions were so ridiculous that the reader almost fell out of the chair laughing. At times, two players came up with almost the same definition, yet neither was even close to the correct one.

If boredom ever sets in, I know I can amuse myself by just examining the contents of another overstuffed drawer in an end table or chest.