Pool

The Buchanan family pool.
(Photo by Katy Buchanan)

I have splashed through my last laps at home.

My family has inhabited this space for 48 years and it is past time to go. The pool won't be open next year.

So many good memories of parents, siblings, schoolmates, neighbors, nephews, in-laws and friends enjoying this space.

My dad used to swim laps in this pool. So did my mom.

I remember, after coming back home from college, skinny-dipping with friends early in the morning and sharing champagne and strawberries with sour cream and brown sugar.

The pool was part of the scenery and of the reception on my wedding day.

The service for my late brother Chris was held on the deck that he used to power wash.

My late brother Peter fearlessly bounced off the long-gone diving board. (I don't remember using the board, but I do remember doing racing dives off the deep end. Mom was a fanatic about all us kids knowing how to swim.)

There were noodles, inflatables, water guns and lots of hilarity. And so much time spent just sitting on the deck and talking into the evening, the underwater light keeping dusk away.

Originally, there was a wrought iron fence surrounding the pool. I remember spending a high school summer stripping the white paint off of it. A few years later, my parents had the fence taken down and the pool refurbished. It still has the pretty blue tiles from that remodel circling under the coping.

My nephews as recently as this summer came to visit and, in between gaming and practicing guitar, dove in with the casual exuberance of very young men.

The water was cold on Sunday, but the sun was shining. After about 45 minutes, I got out and, even though I had slathered on sunblock, was still a bit sunburned.

The best thing about swimming is that it really gets your heart rate up. You can feel its benefits throughout the day. And you'll sleep well, too.

Thanks for the memories, pool.

Time

There is, among many, a great scene in the movie "Blade Runner," toward the end. Rutger Hauer's character is dying as Harrison Ford's character watches. Its in a deep, depressingly rainy, decaying and dark city. Hauer's character, as a replicant who has developed human emotions, aches to think that all he has felt, learned, touched, loved and experienced, will be lost "as tears, in the rain."

It's hard to describe what those words mean to me. They mean everything.

Today, the day broke to a turquoise sky, to carpets of gold and bronze, to the sounds of .... leaf blowers. (We interrupt this reverie! Attention: Please put on your noise-cancelling headphones!)

Yet, it was all my morning, my day. I watched the dogs put their noses to piles of leaves, I listened to leaf blowers and to football games on TV. I sat outside in the slanting afternoon sun and picked a November bouquet out of herbs and flowers luckily untouched by frost.

A tear to remember. Holli, evening walk in the park. She wades into the stream, into a small pool, dips her needle nose down and drinks.

She finishes and a few drops fall from her nose. The pond's surface ripples and I see dark shapes, linear and uneven. The ripples lose energy and the surface becomes still, the reflected images clearer. The still mirror becomes a canvas for the bare trees.

I think this is the meaning of tears in the rain. To notice, and to remember, the beauty of the most ordinary of moments.

August, after

Thank you, Counting Crows, for the inspiration for the title of this post.

I love August.

The crickets and cicadas buzz and sing at night, having taken over the night air from the fireflies of June and July. The sun is moving lower in the sky and there is a sense of gathering in the world. A gathering of last enjoyments of summer -- even though the warm days will last another six to eight weeks or so. A gathering up in the mind of preparation for winter's dark months. A gathering up of all that has been enjoyed -- quiet talks at dusk, dogs snoozing on the summer lawn, the pleasures (and frustrations) of the summer garden, the sun on bare skin, the cool sparkle of a clear pool-- and the anticipation of enjoying it all again next year.

August.

I think the year should be counted by halves. March to August and September to February. It is a richer way of marking time, and more subtle too, than the artificial observance of a calendar year's passing.


A musical ending. Some years ago, my sister Suzanne presented Carl with a CD by Pete Yorn. It rested, unlistened to, for a while. We have recently pulled it out of the pile, and have been enjoying it so much. He has a new release coming out in September with Scarlett Johansson.

So, we're late to the party, but thanks Pete Yorn. "Music for the Morning After" is tremendous.