{"id":13405,"date":"2026-10-12T20:31:55","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T20:31:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/?p=13405"},"modified":"2026-10-12T20:31:55","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T20:31:55","slug":"women-over-60-caught-having-s-are-far-more-likely-tosee-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/?p=13405","title":{"rendered":"Women over 60 caught having s\u2026 are far more likely to\u2026See more"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Elias Voss, 62, retired federal wildland fire investigator, had spent the last eight years perfecting the art of being left alone. Since his wife passed from ovarian cancer in 2015, he\u2019d turned down every invitation to the downtown taproom\u2019s weekly beer garden, called every neighbor who dropped off a casserole overly nosy, and mocked the TikTok teens who\u2019d flocked to the edges of the recent 120-acre wildfire outside town to film \u201cfire porn\u201d for clout. His only consistent companion was a three-legged hound named Smokey, and he liked it that way. The only reason he was even at the beer garden that crisp October evening was his 22-year-old niece had threatened to cancel his satellite internet if he didn\u2019t \u201cget out and talk to a human who doesn\u2019t drool on your work boots.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was leaning against a splintered cornhole board nursing an amber ale, scowling at a group of kids holding their phones up to the fire pit, when he heard a low laugh next to him. \u201cI yelled at three of those little shits just yesterday for climbing the fence around my nursery to film the fire line. Almost sprayed them with my hose for tramping my trillium beds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He turned. The woman was 58 if he had to guess, streaks of silver in her dark curly hair, mud crusted on the cuffs of her Carhartt jeans, a half-empty hard cider in one hand. A patch sewn to her flannel shirt read *Mountain Native Nursery*\u2014Clara, he remembered, the woman who\u2019d moved to town six months prior, who everyone kept trying to set him up with, who he\u2019d actively avoided at the farmers\u2019 market three weeks running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He grunted in agreement. \u201cThose kids don\u2019t get that fire doesn\u2019t care how many likes you get. One wrong step and they\u2019d have been another statistic the crews had to dig out of ash.\u201d He held up his left hand, the thick scar across his knuckles pale against his sun-aged skin, from digging through fire debris to find the cause of a 2019 blaze in the Nantahala National Forest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She leaned in to look, her elbow brushing his bicep as she gestured to the scar. The scent of pine and sage hit him, sharp and warm, no heavy perfume, just the smell of the woods and the lavender soap she used. \u201cI know that scar. I\u2019ve got one just like it on my ankle, from stepping on a half-burned log when I was out collecting milkweed seeds last week.\u201d She tilted her ankle up to show him, the thin silvery line peeking out above her work boot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elias tensed up, half ready to make an excuse to leave, half fascinated. He\u2019d spent so long convincing himself he didn\u2019t want to talk to anyone, that any sort of connection at his age was foolish, a waste of time, a betrayal of the life he\u2019d built with his wife. But Clara didn\u2019t push, didn\u2019t ask him prying questions about his ring finger, which still had the faint indent of a wedding band he\u2019d stopped wearing two years prior. She just ranted about the county\u2019s stupid fire mitigation rules, about how they kept tearing out native brush that was actually fire-resistant to plant water-hungry grass that burned faster than paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Elias Voss, 62, retired federal wildland fire investigator, had spent the last eight years perfecting the art of being left alone. Since his wife passed from ovarian… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13406,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13405\/revisions\/13406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsbreeze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}