Mom2Mom : Summer Is Here ... Almost

We are Pool People.

I cannot fathom how any human survives a summer here without access, preferably daily, to a pool. And, why yes, I DO know exactly how spoiled and lucky us pool people are.

Growing up here, my mother dropped my sister and me off every single weekday morning at 8 a.m. for swim team practice, followed by lessons, followed by an endless day in and out of the water, pestering our heroes, the lifeguards.

She returned to pick us up in the late afternoon. By that time, we would be pretty close to comatose, stunned by the combined effects of an entire day in the sun, leaping in and out of the pool, and breathing chlorine fumes. Often, we would fall asleep in the back of their ancient Volkswagon bug, a car so old that it lacked any seat belts at all, front seats and back.

Those were the days before goggles, when all eyes were red. Those were the days when all Coppertone made sunscreen ... and SPF 10 was considered a total sunblock. The smell of Coppertone can STILL act as some portal to the past, transporting me back to swim meets and watermelon fights.

On weekends, she dropped us off at 10 a.m. This was pretty much my entire summer life until I was 18 and went to college. I was a lifeguard, carefully covering every inch of exposed skin with either Crisco (we kept a tub of it in the snack bar refrigerator) or a mixture of iodine and baby oil.

Shocking, isn't it? Even ... horrifying? Did I mention that we are also Tan People? Because we are. Very.

Then I began a life without pools, as living by the ocean reduced the requirement for one, and living in the mountains reduced the heat stroke factor that living here brings out every summer. Again, no need for one.

But now I have been back for eight years and pool season is kicking up again, preparing to be fully unleashed the day schools across the region are out for the summer. When Flipper was a wee babe, only three or four weeks old, I would take showers with her, and hold her wobbly head up to the spray. I will not have a kid that hates water ran through my mind over and over.

It seems to have worked. Unlike child-me, she is resistant to lessons of any kind, insisting that she can make her way through life largely self-taught, and really, who am I to argue with that?

I wanted to learn how to swim so badly, I took lessons at 4 and was on my first team at 5. Flipper has no desire for lessons, or teams, or meets of any kind. Yet. Currently, she is quite a proficient dog-paddler, can float on her back, etc. Few things make me more nostalgic for childhood than watching Flipper's sheer, unbridled enthusiasm for "her" pools.

I am thankful for many things, but right up there on that list is our access to not one, but two pools, and that Flipper has inherited not just my love and ease in water, but the ability to easily and darkly tan.

Right now, the only pool we have been in this spring is the one in our townhouse neighborhood. And it deters her not a bit that the water could easily be used for those fund-raising Polar Bear Club thingies people do up North in the winter.

She is almost always the only person in the pool, and she frolics about while I keep one eye on my magazine and the other eye on her. I watch, fascinated (and revolted), as her lips get darker and darker until I cannot bear it any longer and she gets out, shivering uncontrollably, to bury herself in a huge towel and sit in my lap while I try not to look at her purple lips any longer than I have to.

Then she gets in again. Then we go home, and I think about how many ways things have changed between Now and Then and yet how one thing stays the same: The pool in the summer.