The Pool

The other day I was cleaning the pool and got to contemplating this 20,000+ gallon body of water sitting in my backyard. If i had a choice there would not be a huge hole filled with water in my backyard. When we moved to Florida five years ago and were looking for a house we found the one that we thought would be just right for us. It was a nice size, right price and in a nice established neighborhood with a pool. Now, living in Florida a pool would seem like a great idea, right? Yes it is when somebody else owns it and you get to visit and go swimming on a hot summer day. Try taking care of keeping the water crystal clear on hot summer days.

Mind you I'm not complaining, alright maybe a little, but that beautiful swimming environment does not just happen on it's own. It takes a lot of work and a lot of chemicals. Not only that, now the liner is starting to rip. You don't even want to know how much that will cost to repair. We are not talking about a little wading pool here but a very large body of water with a diving board and slide. Kim keeps telling me she wants a house by the water; I keep telling her, "look out the back window".

OK, back to the pool cleaning story. While I was skimming the top of the pool and trying to skim up some of the leaves and debris that settled on the bottom I thought about actually swimming in this pool. Last year I think i went in the pool once, and that was to retrieve some fallen object that i couldn't get with the net. I am not a pool person or for that matter even a water person. To me water is for drinking, cooking, washing and other water things that God intended, not sports. Never the less, back to the pool cleaning. After completing the skimming and lower debris removal it was time for the vacuuming. Yes you have to vacuum the pool also. All the leaves, twigs, dirt, algae, critters and anything else that falls into the pool eventually settles to the bottom. Ergo, you need to vacuum to get it out of the pool.

After you vacuum you need to turn the pool pump off and clean out the filter basket which is now clogged up from all the junk you just removed from the bottom of the pool. You put your hand in the basket and pull out old leaves, dead spiders and lizards that you just sucked up from the bottom. Put everything back together and start the pump going again. And speaking of the pump, it needs to run about eight hours a day which requires electricity which means a higher electric bill. When the pump starts running again you look at the nice crystal clear water and clean liner at the bottom of your beautifully maintained pool and say to yourself, job well done.

A gust of wind kicks up and every leaf in the neighborhood finds it's way to my pool like steel to a magnet. In the five years I have lived here I have had at least six trees cut down. Now don't get the wrong idea, I love trees, but i do own a pool. These were ugly trees, whose only purpose in life was to put leaves and pine needles in my pool. So why with the removal of these trees does every leaf from every tree in the surrounding neighborhood find it's way to my pool? And so the process begins over and over and over again.

So why keep the pool? For one thing it is probably to costly to fill it in. And for a more important thing my family loves it. When Michele and the grand kids come down in the summer, the pool is used from the time they arrive until the time they leave. Kathy said my granddaughter Brittney wants to have her sixteenth birthday at our house with a pool party. My niece Beth and her family come over and it is a joy to watch all the kids sliding, diving and just enjoying the pool activities. If the time comes that the kids no longer want to use the pool and it is no longer a draw for gathering the family together for barbecues and poolside fun, it will become a costly, time consuming hole in the ground filled with 20,000+ gallons of water. Until then it is a labor of love that I will enjoy, but complain about because otherwise it wouldn't be me. Maybe I could raise sharks and alligators.