The Sack Race I Ran Behind the Barn

The Race

I never knew a potato sack race could make grown men holler like that.

By the third heat half the fathers were lined up along the pumpkins, yelling like it was state football.

The little kids went first and it was mostly falling down. Maddie tipped over at ten feet and laughed so hard she could not get up.

A boy crossed the line on his knees because he refused to quit, and his daddy roared.

A little girl in a church dress would not take her turn until her grandmother ran a lane first to prove it was safe.

The grandmother went down in a heap at the twenty-foot mark and came up with grass in her hair, laughing like a girl of sixteen.

There was a boy on crutches, the Dvorak boy, who could not run but wanted a sack like everybody else.

Bo cut the bottom out of one so the boy could stand in it and jump with his good leg. We counted him down the lane and he beat his own time twice.

That is the part I wish Lorene had seen from the start. Not one child stood at the edge of my yard being told there was no room.

The big kids were a war. The Hoff boy and the Petersen girl came down the lanes neck and neck.

They hit the straw bales in a tangle and the whole lot of us came up out of our chairs at once.

Dale ran the finish from the hay wagon, calling places. Marge worked the coffee.

Somewhere in there a grandpa I did not know had brought a bag of caramels and was throwing them to the kids who lost.

Bo raced in the middle heat. He had practiced two weeks for this.

He came down that chalk lane hopping for all he was worth, arms pumping, face set. And he did not win.

He came in third, red-faced and gasping, and it did not matter even a little.

It was his race, in his yard, and nobody on God’s earth was going to pull him out of this one.

He flopped on the grass at the finish and lay there looking at the sky, breathing hard, grinning.

I had to turn around and look at the barn for a second so nobody would see my face.

We ran that race an hour and a half. Every kid went twice. Some went five times.

We ran out of heats before a single child was willing to stop. Marge made a second urn of coffee. The pancakes Dale had saved got handed around cold and nobody minded.

Between heats the kids did not scatter. They sat along the straw bales in a row, comparing grass stains and arguing who was fastest.

I looked at them and thought, this is the whole thing. Not the winning.

The lineup where there is room for the last kid the same as the first.