The polo courts need work. Because of a few generous donations, a lot of smaller offerings, several loads of donated lumber, and last weekend’s exhausting polo tournament, we can make that work happen. On Thursday, Keith from the Clinton Foundation, along with a couple of dozen volunteers from Americorps, came to help renovate our polo courts.
Vinnie keeps impaling his arms on the pointy edges of the chain-link that separates the two courts. The city of LR found some extra ball-field edging in one of its storage places, and an Americorps volunteer put it on for us.
They were able to use a lot of donated lumber to frame up the sides of the new court. We bought long, straight 2x4s for the tops and bottoms of the framing, and we had new plywood for the faces.
The volunteers spent some time cutting our donated 2x4s to specific lengths. On Saturday, Allison and some others put a little time into shaping those scraps into some pretty cool bike-rack planters.
Mandy was on hand for the tournament (she played on a unicycle) and for the Saturday work day. She got very dirty and had a great time working alongside her friends.
Keith, from the Clinton Foundation, plays polo with us occasionally. The first few times, he went home with some pretty impressive bruises. But he kept coming, and he likes what we’re doing. Keith’s support for this project was a very big deal.
Keith’s bruises are insignificnant in comparison to Darcie’s. Darcie always has AMAZING bruises. Plus, she’s pretty good with a cordless screwdriver. And she has excellent taste in poetry and literature.
So finally, on Saturday at nearly dark, the courts were done. We built the sides on court two from scratch, and replaced the one really terrible side on the first court.
Cleaning up was a monumental task, but lots of people were there to help. We made an enormous pile of scrap lumber – some of the boards we’d pulled off the old court were so termite-eaten that they fell apart in our hands. Sweeping and blowing the dust off the court was really important, since we had to leave it free of splinters and slipperyness.
When it was all done, we even had time for some very exhausted people to play a couple of games of very slow polo on a couple of very nice courts.
