Do you know where your marbles are?

"Do you know where your marbles are?" asks Michele Beckett. She knows where her marbles are - usually, unless she drops her bag of marbles and they scatter around the house.

"Whenever I get a really bad night, rather than reach for medicine, I would rather reach for the box of marbles," she explained about her marble therapy.

Living on an East Penn Township farm, from time to time Beckett found her goats or horses fidgeting and when they fidgeted, they occasionally stepped on her foot, usually her right foot. Four times, she visited the hospital, but all they could do was bandage her fractured toe.

As she neared her 60th birthday three years ago, Beckett found that she could no longer kneel to work in her garden without feeling an excruciating pain in her right foot. She had her foot operated on and her doctor fused the bones of her second toe.

"They told me I wasn't going to regain total bone control," she said. "I was afraid of losing my other toes. That was what was happening for months until I went to Phoenix Rehab in Lehighton.

Her therapist, Rachel, poured a box of marbles onto the floor.

"Take your shoes and socks off and pick up a marble and put it in the box with your toes,"she said.

"I didn't think much of it at first," Beckett said. "If I could do this at rehab, I could do this just as well at home.

"So, I went looking for marbles and I couldn't find the kind of marbles that I played with as a child. I couldn't find the Cat's Eyes or the Peltiers that I was more familiar with."

In a craft shop, she finally located marbles - they were being sold as glass beads for hydroponic plants.

She began picking up the marbles with her toes and found that after a while, she enjoyed picking them up while she was on the computer or watching television.

"I was thinking when I was a child, I used to have marbles," she said. "I said to my husband, Frank, 'I know we had marbles.'"

She thought back to her post-World War II days of growing up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

"I was four years old and I remember watching my sisters and cousins playing marbles," she recalled. "We walked four blocks to Owl's Head Park near the Staten Island Ferry."

When she went to the park for picnics with her family, they played marbles on the grass. When she went with her friends, they played on the asphalt or the concrete.

The game was played by putting 13 normal sized marbles - or "nibs" - into the circle and trying to knock them out of the circle using a larger one-inch "shooter" marble.

When she was younger, Beckett engaged in "fair play," meaning every player had their marbles returned at the end of the game. When she was older, she played "for keeps" meaning that the winner kept the marbles.

Marbles are played somewhat like pool. One ball is used to knock the other ball out of play. Michele was good at both marbles and pool.

She was so good at pool, that one evening when she was playing it at the former Omrod Hotel near Egypt, Pa., a stranger put a quarter on the table, the price of a game of pool, challenging her.

"I had the table and he was arrogant and thought he could beat me," Michele said. "I said, 'come on' and I cleaned his clock. Back then, most men didn't take women seriously on pool playing."

Michele met Frank from time to time at wherever there were pool tables. They soon planned to meet and play. Frank was fascinated by the lady who constantly bested him in at the table. Eventually, they married and bought their East Penn farm.

Michele's first sport was marbles. Then it was pool, and now she's looking at introducing marbles to a new generation.

"I'm going to teach my grandchildren to play and tell others," she said. "It's an interesting game, and one we forget. We send them to a TV or computer. We forget how to play with children."

"And for foot pains," Michele added, "I recommend marbles to people. It helps to get those muscles and tendons to work."