I once told my husband that if he got me a pool, I’d never get dressed all summer long.  I imagined resort life, with swim suits, a coverup the closest thing to clothing.  I might even wear flip-flops. . He said, “You have a pool in your future.”

Until then, I like to visit people who have pools.  In my informal survey, I know five black families with pools.  A recuring theme of pool ownership is maintainance.  One family kept their pool closed as long as the husband worked out of town.  Nobody else in the family could maintain the pool.  Another family I know just got their house with pool.  The pool sat un-used for many years, and the family has yet to uncover, clean, and fill the pool.

Another family uses their pool, and they’re very generous with it.  The woman of the house is a grandmother, and a retired Jr. High principal.  She is able to host all the neighborhood children as well as her grandchildren.  I love how her children have bucked the black non-swimming trend, and have passed swimming on to their children as well.

One of my daughter’s friends has a pool, but we haven’t seen it yet, so I can’t speak about their pool-keeping habits.

But I can talk about my soon to be sister-in-law.  She has a pool which has been a lot of trouble for her.  She has had to find leaks, plug drains, and prune trees in order to use her pool.  She had thought about filling it in, it was so much trouble, but that would have cost more than fixing it. Now she has my brother, a fish and swim geek like myself, to help with the maintainance.  And she is very generous with her pool as well, offering its use even when she’s not home.  I haven’t tried it out yet.

So what am I waiting for?

For one, this has been a crazy cold summer.  As I type, it is 60 degrees in July.  Outrageous.  And when it’s been hot enough to swim, I’ve been busy doing other things.  But, as my brother pointed out when I spoke to him yesterday, “there are sure to be a few more warm days this summer.”