Tennis platze

Saturday Nico picked us up at 10am and we drove over to the outdoor tennis courts on the far side of town to meet up with some others on the team and get the clay courts ready for play. It was just the second true day of spring, in my opinion, and it was a beauty. Sun blazing, temps in the upper 60s or low 70s, not a cloud in sight, a bit of a cooling breeze. We wore shorts and tees and were immediately put to work pulling tables and chairs out of the storage bungalows, then scraping, raking, shoveling, and wheelbarrowing 2 tons of old red clay sand off the 3 courts, and then wheelbarrowing, shoveling, spreading, raking, and smoothing 2 tons of new sand onto them. It took all day and was very, very hard work. But Nico broke out the beer at 11am (I love the German work ethic--from what I can tell, any kind of work deserves beer asap, regardless of time of day) so everyone enjoyed themselves.

Wolfgang barbequed bratwursts, chicken breasts, and pork steaks and we ate and drank beer for an hour, still in the sun. Besides me and Wolfgang's daughter, it was all men, mostly older guys. And as we were finishing lunch and some people were headed back out to pick up shovels, Wolfgang said something in German that included my name. I looked at Bill for translation. With a sly little grin, he said that Wolfgang had just announced that his daughter and I could clean up lunch. Wow. Okay. All I could do was laugh and start clearing the men's plates. When I was done washing dishes, I sat with Bill on the lawn overlooking the courts and told him that if these men were going to expect me to embody their outdated ideas of gender roles, then I was going to reciprocate and let the men do the hard labor for a while. So I stretched out in the sun, in full view of the courts, and napped for an hour.

When I woke up, feeling a bit guilty and dazed from the sun, I did go back out and reclaim my shovel. Bill had his tennis headband tied around his forehead all day, and got a pretty hilarious tan line between his sunburned face and his winter-white forehead. Luckily, his hair covers the worst of it so hopefully his students won't tease him too terribly. I got some sunburn too, on my arms and shoulders. Pretty mild, but seeing as it was the first sun to touch my skin in 5 months, I was fairly knocked out by it, spent the evening slightly feverish and unable, because of sore muscles, to move much from the couch. We were absolute slugs that night. Could barely finish the one beer we had with dinner, then slept like logs for 12 hours. Delicious.

And now, hopefully, the bit of color on my skin will forestall most of my mum's traditional teasing about my ghostly whiteness and devotion to 55 spf sunscreen.