Blue Pool

We are in the midst of a heat wave here in most parts of Ontario and the humidity is draining our strength and our good humor. Well it was until I got a really good nights sleep..Plus my husband and I are very, very grateful for small mercies, our blue pool.

Our neighbours next door have a lovely, long indoor pool, complete with curving slide and steps down into the shallow end. They are getting a lot of use out of their pool these days with grandchildren and adult children coming most days after their work day. Carl, our neighbour says the water in his pool is up to 93 degrees. They love it.

Not to brag or anything, but we have a pool too..not a big, lovely inground pool but a blue rubber pool that we have to put up every year around the 24th of May and take down before the frost hits. Usually around the end of of August or middle of September as our pool loses it's heat quite quickly. Although my husband has rigged up a network of hoses which rest on top of my gardening shed so the sun can heat the water running back and forth to the pool, once the temperature starts dropping in the evenings, so does the pool temperature.

This is our second blue pool, we purchased one from Sears when we first moved here nine years ago but the rubber ring around the top started losing air after five or six years and that was the end of that one. We purchased our second one the following summer, the same size and same make. It is fifteen feet across and we absolutely love it. We have found it's all we need in our small yard to cool us off when these heat spells hit. Many friends and family members have made good use of it during family reunions here.

It is our ticket to survival when the temperatures hit thirty and higher with humidity making us melt. This week I've been in on average three to four times a day and can feel my blood pressure going lower once I've been in a few seconds. The first thing my husband does on coming home from work each evening is change and dive into the pool. (one is not supposed to dive in these pools, but he manages a very shallow dive over the side!). The temperature is around 84 degrees now and we find it almost too warm.

We feel this pool is our life-saver on hot days when the radio and television announcers warn people to stay out of the sun, don't do any heavy work and drink lots and lots of fluids. It's like getting permission to laze around the house, read a book outside in between trips into the pool. That in itself is an exercise as I must find my sunglasses, a hat and a t-shirt to wear. I'm very protective of my back and getting sunburned there as my father died of melanoma cancer.

Also more years back than I care to remember my doctor told me as we age our skin gets thinner so since he knew I gardened all the time, he adviced me to wear long sleeved shirts while gardening. It was a pain trying to find thin, long-sleeved shirts but I managed. Now I only have to slather on suntan lotion on about two inches of skin between the rolled up cuffs on the shirts and the spot where my gardening gloves stop.

As we hear our neighbours grandchildren squeal with delight while swimming or playing next door, we have felt envious at times, we are after all human but we are more than pleased and grateful for our little blue pool. I longed for a pool for many, many years and even now after having two of them, somedays I can hardly believe I'm so lucky. As I lounge around in our little blue pool or do exercises that I learned several years back in aquafit classes in our town pool, I am ever so thankful and grateful that our yard contains our little treasure.

In the scheme of things it's not all that pretty or long or deep and every year it requires a lot of work to be set up and then emptied and cleaned before going back into it's box and getting stored away over the winter. They cannot be left outside in our winters. But we are rather attached to our little blue pool and since we are having another scorching day, I'm going outside to climb in....