End of pool season (flashback to 9-4-15)

Waxing sentimental about our pool season, which ended last Friday -- a season we concluded has encompassed four summers of going to the Princeton Community Park Pool for sun, warm water (mostly!), relaxing, forcible removal from home routines. No denying it's a time gobbler: up to 4 hours spent commuting, lapping, showering and re-dressing each pool day. But so worth it!

The 2 women I've been aware of for the last few weeks this summer: they're older, they wear 2-piece suits (inappropriately, I've thought), they sit in the sun on the pool deck, regularly applying sun screen, especially on their bare (midriffs? bellies? torsos?) as if they enjoy doing it, feeling it. Who knows what they think of while applying it -- remembering their youth and beauty? another time or place? a different person smoothing it on them?

When one of them -- the one who drives there in a small convertible and who looks the best, in her black sunglasses w/ her wavy blondish hair -- walks around, her belly curves out, while her shoulders curve in. That's when her age is so apparent. But to give her credit, she doesn't conceal her body, or refrain from walking around. I like to think she's reached this point and feels she earned the sensuous relaxation of these pool days.   

I also like to think she has enjoyed shared sensuousness, and maybe now her own touch on herself with that sunscreen is a kind of reminder of such good things earlier in her life.

And then this reality: some people look much better (fully) dressed than (virtually) undressed. 

So, adieu to the pool and all the people (including the many we nicknamed), and the fudge bars and the occasional fries -- but most of all, the healthful feeling of just being there, making our way through the water and feeling better for it. . . and being lucky enough for all that to happen.

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Two in the Pool 

Like a tropical fish whose fluttery fins

undulate gracefully

next to me --

briefly --

before speeding far ahead,

the girl in the “medium” speed lane

leaves me, like a manatee,

moving deliberately

toward the end

of “slow.”

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Sun Tracks

Easy to tell without looking up

when the sun moves behind a cloud:

Looking down, I see the water darken

while golden ripple lines on the bottom –

a wavy plaid of light-through-aqua –

fade away.

#

                                    --9-15