Hello and welcome to our kitchen. I'm Rosemary Wiles. My husband Ron and I milk sixty Holsteins on his family's farm in western Wisconsin, and every Sunday night after chores, Ron's brother Rich and his wife Louise drive over, and the four of us sit down at this oak table and play double-deck pinochle until somebody wins or somebody has to get up at five. Usually both.

The table was Ron's folks'. When Grandpa Lloyd and Grandma Minerva moved to town in the spring of 1964 and turned the farm over to Ron and me, they left the table, and Grandpa made us promise to keep the Sunday game going. Rich and Louise were married that June, on a Saturday, and the Sunday after they got home from their honeymoon, June 14, 1964, the four of us played our first game here. We have played nearly every Sunday since.

It's always Ron and me against Rich and Louise. We tried switching partners once, in 1971, for one night, and nobody liked it, and we have never spoken of it again.

Grandpa came out every Sunday to watch, and to make sure nobody talked across the table, until he passed in 1987. His chair is still at the end of the table. Nobody sits in it but the cat.

Our granddaughter Karen set up this page for me last fall, and this summer she and her brother Eric did something nobody under twenty has ever done in this family, which you can read about below. I'm told I should say I am not at all bitter about it. I'm not. Much.

A regular pinochle deck has 48 cards: two each of the nine, ten, jack, queen, king and ace in all four suits. For double-deck you shuffle two pinochle decks together and take out all the nines. That leaves 80 cards, four of every card, aces, tens, kings, queens and jacks. Four players, partners sitting across from each other, and each one gets twenty cards. The cards rank ace high, then the ten, then king, queen, jack. Yes, the ten beats the king. You'll get used to it.

A hand goes in three parts:

1. Bidding. Starting at the dealer's left, each player bids or passes. The bid is how many points you think you and your partner can make between your meld and your tricks. You have to go up each time, and once you pass, you're out. The high bidder names trump.
2. Meld. Everybody lays down their meld, which is certain sets of cards in your hand that are worth points (see the chart). You write it down, then pick your cards back up.
3. Tricks. The bidder leads, and you play out all twenty tricks. Every ace, ten and king you take in a trick counts one point. There are 48 of those in the deck, and the last trick is worth 2 more, so there are always exactly 50 points to be had in the play.

If the bidding side makes its bid, both sides add what they made. If the bidders come up short, they've gone set: they lose the whole bid off their score and get nothing for that hand, and the other side still adds theirs. On Sunday nights we play to 500.

That's the short of it. The long of it, with the bidding and the rules for the tricks and the hands people argue about, is on its own page: How We Play: Rules and Meld Chart.

This is the same chart that's been taped inside the lid of our card box since Grandpa wrote it out. Karen typed it up. "Double" means you have two of the whole set in your own hand.

• Tens aren't worth anything in meld. They make up for it in the tricks.
• One card can be in more than one meld if the melds are different kinds. The queen of spades can be in a marriage, a pinochle, and queens around, all at once. But it can't be in two pinochles.
• The king and queen in your run don't count again as a royal marriage. If you've got another king and queen of trump besides, those count.
• Some families count everything times ten, so aces around is 100 and a run is 150. Same game with more zeros. We count small because Grandpa did.

Every family that plays pinochle has its own rules, and every family thinks everybody else's are wrong. These are ours.

Grandpa's Rule: no table talk. This is the big one. You may talk about the weather, the milk check, the Packers, the neighbors, the price of fuel, or anything else under the sun. You may not say one word, make one face, or heave one sigh about the cards in your hand until the last trick is turned. Grandpa said if you want your partner to know what you're holding, you can write him a letter and mail it Monday. The first time somebody slips, they get a look. The second time, ten points come off their side. Grandpa took points off his own son on our very first night, and Ron has not table-talked since. Rich still does about once a winter, and Louise kicks him under the table before anybody else can say a word.

The bidder goes out first. If both sides go over the top on the same hand, the side that took the bid wins. That's how Grandpa did it and it's how we do it. It came up at the tournament this year, and boy, did it ever.

You have to take a trick to save your meld. If your side lays down meld and then doesn't take a single trick, your meld doesn't count.

The bidder needs a marriage in trump. You can't name a suit for trump unless you hold the king and queen of it.

We pass three. After the bid, the bidder and partner each pass three cards to each other. Grandpa never did hold with passing, and he said so every Sunday for twenty-three years.

Nobody plays during chores. The cows come first. They always have.

The losers wash the coffee cups. Ron has gotten good at it.

Every Labor Day weekend the Wiles family reunion is here at the farm, on the Saturday so the folks who drove in can get home Monday. There's a potluck at noon in the yard, horseshoes for the men who don't play cards, and at two o'clock the pinochle tournament starts on card tables in the machine shed. Two-person teams, sign up by noon, games to 300, one game a round, lose and you're out.

This year it was Saturday, September 4, and eight teams signed up.

Karen is seventeen and Eric is fifteen. They're Kurt and Bonnie's kids, our grandchildren, and they have been watching this table since they could see over it. In the first round they beat their own mother and father, and Kurt says he's going to be hearing about it until the kids are grown and gone. I told him they already are, nearly. That didn't help.

As for the semifinal: Louise melded 119 in one hand, double aces, a run and a pinochle, which is the high meld of the day and the most I have ever seen anybody lay down in this family, and Ron and I never recovered. I'll say no more. Grandpa's rule.

The final, hand by hand. Karen kept the score sheet and let me copy it. Each side's number for the hand is its meld plus the points it took in the tricks, and the trick points between the two sides always come to 50. When the bidders go set, all they get is the bid taken off.

Hand 3, Rich bid 60 on a long spade suit and came up short, and that was the first time all afternoon the kids looked like they might do it. Hand 8, Eric melded a run in hearts with aces, kings and queens around, 39 all by himself, and bid 70 on it, and the machine shed got very quiet. Then on the last hand Karen took the bid at 52, and they made it, and Rich and Louise went over 300 on the very same hand. But the bidder goes out first. Grandpa's rule. Karen and Eric won it 311 to 301.

There's a traveling trophy, a cribbage board Ron's uncle carved that we hang a ribbon on, and for the first time it's going home with somebody who can't vote yet. I could not be prouder. Rich could not be crankier. Louise says he slept fine.

Every Sunday night, whoever wins a game gets a mark in the book. It's a green ledger from the farm store, and it's on its fourth one since 1964. Louise keeps it now. Here's every year: the Sundays we played, the games, and who won them. The winner of each year is in bold.

* 1964: from June 14 on. 1974: Ron broke his leg in March getting down out of the silo, and Rich made us skip seven Sundays because he said it wasn't sporting to play him on painkillers. 1977: three Sundays in January when the town road wasn't plowed out. 1987: Grandpa passed in February. We didn't play for four Sundays, and then Minerva called and told us to get back to the table, so we did. 1996: Louise's surgery kept us away five Sundays, and the year came out dead even, 51 games apiece. 1999: through Sunday, August 29.

So that's 1,745 Sunday nights and 3,732 games, and after thirty-five years Rich and Louise are ahead of us by twelve games. Twelve. Out of three thousand seven hundred and thirty-two. Ron says that's as close to a tie as two people can get. I say we're ten games up this year, and there are seventeen Sundays left before New Year's, counting tonight, and I'm not done.