A Brief History of the Pool

Where have I been, you ask? I whisper to you the magical secret:

The pool opened.

What's that? you ask.

I said, "The pool opened!!!"

This may seem trivial to you, but to me it's heavenly lights gleaming down and the music of angels and harps and all kinds of mess. It's rainbows and bubbles and sunshine. It's a place to take the children where they are happy and it wears them out, and I can talk to grown ups and get my vitamin D intake all at the same time and - gasp! - relax!

Now, it does take away from my blog time a bit, but my sanity really is more important.

It's funny to me how much the meaning of the pool has changed for me over time. When I was a kid, it was a place to jump off the high dive and eat sno cones and sit on the side for adult swim with my feet danging in the water for those endless ten minutes. It was running from boys and playing Categories and Shark and Marco Polo. It was doing handstands on the bottom of the pool and talking through bubbles to see if the other person could hear you.

Then when I was a teenager it was The Tan. Boy watching from behind sunglasses and The Tan. That was when my hips still fit into the bikini bottoms that taunt me now. I guess at some point my posterior really was shaped like a triangle, but it ain't so no more. Not a lot to say about the teenage years once we move past The Tan.

In my in between years, it was still The Tan, but it was more one-sided as much of my pool time was spent babysitting, and therefore at great attention to my charges. Thus, on my back and rather flounder-like in my tanning ways. The pool was still the greatest place for us to escape on those hot summer days and not any less relaxing. When not babysitting, it was the Great Apartment Pool. The one that no one went to during the day and you could float on your raft and read your book and drink your tasty adult beverage that fit right into the cup holder on your raft. Being that those were "in between years", thusly named for being between the teeange and the adult years, there may or may not have been cannon balling into said apartment pool.

There was a brief interlude between the adult years and the kid years. There was one long summer which we will dub The Summer I Was Pregnant in Texas and There Were 42 Days Over 100 Degrees. That was the summer in which the pool was no longer a luxury or an escape, but an all out necessity. If I wasn't able to get my hefty self buoyant in a cool body of water for at least two hours a day that summer, I'm not sure what might have happened, but it would not have been pretty.

And that brings us to now. Now when preschool is pretty much over and the days are long and hot. The backyard is laden with mosquitoes and humidity and fussy children. But the pool? Is a happy place! It's a place with splashes and waterslides and jumping! You can pick bugs out of the filters and shoot waterguns at people! You can scream and kick and roll and no one yells! It's OKAY to spit water on your brother. It's a happy place.

It's MY happy place and where you can probably find me from now until September if anyone is looking.