Isolated by the coronavirus, us families with high-risk people in them need to get creative. We fill our quiet evenings with talking, reading, blogging, and lately, playing an occasional fierce round of Monopoly.

Most of you know Maria as a sweet, gentle, nature and animal and life farm spirit and elf.

She loves animals, lambs, trees, flowers, spiders, snails, and plants, not to mention her first love, her art. She is also half Sicilian and half German she doesn’t like to lose.

When I am competing with Maria, I see another side of her, the Sicilian part, the fangs and claws come out, and she fights to the death. She won the first four games with an aggressive strategy of buying everything she can, rushing to put up crushing hotels, trading shrewdly.

Her eyes gleam and cackles, and she curses stews and snarls. I am mild and noncompetitive, of course. It’s not about the winning, but the playing.

I’ve developed my own theory of the game; I like to buy the cheaper, less popular properties (I can say no more) and let the more expensive ones go. That didn’t work out well for me at first; I got clobbered.

But I adjusted my strategy somewhat. Neither of us have the longest attention spans in the world, so if it looks bad and is dragging, one of us usually surrenders.

I’ve gone from 4 to 0 to four to two, so I had my dignity back. So far, the marriage is holding up, although there have been some dicey moments.

I have a history with Monopoly; I worked as a reporter at the Atlantic City Press when I started and learned the game; the streets are all named for Atlantic City streets, I spent a lot of nights with the other police reporters playing the game and drinking scotch and whiskey until we were all too plastered to play.

We made all sorts of rules up when we played; it was chaotic and very fast-moving.

My games with Maria are sedate; at least they start that way; we are playing once a week or so. Maria accused me of being so obnoxious when I win that if the situation were reversed, I would refuse to play with her.

This, of course, is not true. I am a gracious and quiet winner and a fine loser, although I think those days of my losing might be over.