Chapter 4: The Senior Games

The Senior Games were held on the lodge lawn the next morning in the rain.

By ten o'clock it had turned into a field of mud.

Renata stood on a hay bale with a bullhorn, in a clean white raincoat, and announced the rules.

Three events, two teams, nine women and nine men.

The winning team got the lantern vote that night, and the losers went home with wet socks.

My roommate leaned over and whispered in my ear.

She was sixty-six and had driven a city bus for thirty years, and she had already told me she could not be shocked.

"That pink cardigan is going to cheat," she said. "Watch her feet."

"She's wearing a cardigan to a mud fight."

"That's how you know she's serious."

The pink cardigan woman waved at us from the far side of the rope.

Ray stood at the very end of our team's line, and I took the place in front of him.

It was the tug-of-war, and Renata blew the horn.

Our whole line leaned back and dug in.

I have spent my whole life pulling thread through tight cloth, and my grip is something no one expects on a woman my size.

The rope burned across my palms.

Behind me Ray's arms came around the rope on both sides of me, solid and warm, and he said quietly, "On three. Don't think. Heel."

We pulled together, and the other side went down in the mud.

The lawn erupted.

"Did you see that?" the retired judge shouted.

"I felt it," I said, and laughed so hard I got mud in my teeth.

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