We had one cruel pandemic year where the neighborhood pool wasn’t open. It was like my neighborhood’s joy was gutted that year. The streets baking with unrelenting heat. No joyful splashing sounds or cute kids in wet bathing suits following like ducklings after their parents.
My neighborhood pool used to be a beauty–it had greenery in boxes around the perimeter, and a green wall in green plastic buckets. My neighborhood doesn’t have a lot of trees, but butterflies would find my pool and sometimes flutter above me as I did the backstroke with my sunglasses on, looking up at the church’s steeple and the little puffy clouds, and the tiny birds twirling even freer than I.
It felt like a secret society, the 15 of us who showed up for adult swim between 6 and 7pm, some of us doing laps, some of us talking softly. It was quiet, it was private, it was not crowded.
We’re two years into the pandemic now and the pool is a little rickety. The flower beds are all dried out, one succulent the lone plant that has not succumbed to the two years of neglect. The brick wall is crumbling so upside down blue garbage cans cordon off the bleachers where we used to sun. There is a very sketchy and large set of zigzagging wood beams bracing the wall bleacher side, like a grim art installation declaiming on the inevitable ravages of time, how my oasis went from delightful refuge to rickety last resort for those determined to swim. There are well worn plastic picnic tables that were moved outside haphazardly laid out to welcome our bags full of towels. Some have started sunning by the wall that abuts the outdoor basketball court, but that doesn’t seem restful.
The one improvement is that there’s now a Leisure side to the pool and a Lap side to the pool during adult swim. I swim in both, slightly too businesslike to dawdle for the full length of my visit, and not quite dedicated enough to lap athletically either. I mostly float in Leisure, which I believe to be the ultimate act of Leisure, though I can’t get to the middle of the pool which was my favorite place to float before they took the midpoint flags down. They used to wave cheerily and brightly above me. I guess they too broke down.
I want the pool to be an allegory for my COVID life. How things fell down, and we struggled to keep them up anyway, how options became limited, delimited, full of anguish, obvious and unseen. How we have rescued leisure and work out the trash fire of these two years. How there is still joy for those who know how to find the pool, urban oasis, and treasure every minute there.