💊 TREE 550: Lois Payne gambles with pills

This week, the words are written by Lois Payne. I’m doing the drawings and choosing the music. I work with Lois. She is super smart and funny and she keeps the Teams chat from getting boring. Her official bio is: ‘Lois Payne is 23 years old and from Shropshire. She has a Master's Degree in Creative Writing and a PhD in procrastination. But she's trying, and hopes to produce a collection of short stories in the near future.’ You can read one of her very short stories by going here and scrolling about halfway down the page. —Jeff

When I was a kid, I played cards a lot with my Grandad. It was a beloved after-school ritual.

He taught me the rules of pontoon, rummy, whist, and the one I liked best, nine card brag. It was the game he and his army friends had favoured to pass the time and redistribute cigarettes.

We would play for whatever was on-hand at the time. Coloured paperclips, tarnished copper coins Grandad kept in an old laundry detergent tub, jellybeans we’d bought from the corner shop. On several occasions we used his medication (of which he has no shortage), assigning different values to the powdery tablets according to their size and colour.

Sure, we could have bought some proper poker chips, but neither of us really cared what we were playing with. And I got pretty good at cleaning up at cards, regardless.

That thing you have been putting off until you feel better prepared? Just start it.

You don’t need the expensive tools. You don’t need to have it all figured out. The most important thing is you play the game.

Work with what you have for now, figure the rest out later, and it will make for a better story.

‘You start believing in magic’ (Spotify)

Grow slowly
Jeff