Mavis Thomas was 67 when she closed the school door and retired from 39 years as an elementary teacher. “Oh, I loved teaching,” she sighs, and a warm smile washes over her face. She’d worked a bit longer than she’d originally planned. After confronting the challenge of uterine cancer, she returned to the classroom for an extra year with students. “I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t done yet,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to say, ‘I’m done’.” Now, three decades later, the