Late August, early September--this is when the year turns, when the invisible pendulum starts its return journey. It’s the last perfect peach, the dead leaf floating on the surface of the pool. Yellow jackets fly lower to the ground, as if they’re looking for a nice retirement home. The cicadas are as loud as ever, and the heat’s still here; by midafternoon, it’ll suck the air out of your lungs. But at dawn, when I go down the driveway to get the paper, there is a whispered but distinct coolness in the air. This is the time of year when nature seems to pause, while time speeds up.
I am thinking about this at our neighborhood pool, which my husband introduced me to when we were still dating. That was 15 years ago. Our neighborhood pool opens on Memorial Day weekend and closes on Labor Day weekend, so in my mind it is always the same—the same oak trees, the same turquoise water, the distant thwack! of a tennis racquet against a ball, one long interminable game of Marco Polo, and somewhere a baby is crying. Yet the summers go by in a blur, and lately even the intervals between summers seem to be speeding up. The overall effect is a kind of time-lapse photography against an unchanging backdrop. People age before my eyes; babies morph into sturdy toddlers and then into the wiry 10-year-olds who are doing cannonballs off the high-dive. The teenage daughter of the pool manager is now the manager herself—a married lady, expecting a child of her own. Next year there’ll be another baby in the wading pool.
And so it goes. Years pass in the space of an afternoon. One minute I am holding onto my firstborn, dipping her chubby legs into the water. Then I turn around, and she’s learned to run, earning a stern warning from the lifeguard: Slow down! But now she’s in the shallow end of the big pool with her dad—I can see her head above the edge! Such a big girl already!—and he is teaching her to blow bubbles, while I am back at the baby pool making sure her baby sister doesn’t do a face plant in the water. Then there is a brief interval of, what? Forty-five minutes?—and I’m sitting in a deck chair looking at our girls organizing a freestyle race in a corner of the big pool’s deep end. “Mom, you be the referee,” one of them calls out, and I wave, okay, but I’m not really paying close attention. I am distracted by the image I see behind them, of a young couple necking discreetly in the corner. It’s me and my husband, the young lovers who were to become their parents.
That’s the thing about late summer at the pool. Maybe it’s the chlorine in the water, I don’t know, but something begins to dissolve my everyday perception of time as a forward progression. Instead I see it in layers—and maybe this is a more accurate way of seeing. Einstein said our concept of linear time is a “stubbornly persistent delusion,” and though I don’t think he said anything about the role of swimming pools in the cosmos, there’s definitely some mysterious effect. John Cheever noted it in “The Swimmer,” where the main character decides to go home from a friend's house by swimming across the four-mile-long series of backyard pools between here and there.
At first it’s fun. But as he gets out of one pool, crosses yards and divider hedges and dives into another, the landscape becomes autumnal. A storm passes over. In one yard, friends inexplicably have gotten older; at the next house, the pool is dry and there is a “For Sale” sign in the overgrown front yard. He grows cold, exhausted, confused; what began as a lark has become an endurance test. The quasi-subterrenean stream he is navigating is time itself, and time is a trickster.
Finally, he's almost there. “He dove in and swam the pool,but when be tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out…Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.”
It makes you want to cry. It does. Yet the flip side of this tricky sense of time is that some moments exist in an eternal now--like this one: it’s Saturday morning, and I am stumbling downstairs to get coffee when I pass my youngest daughter in her baby swing. I lean down to kiss her, holding her face in my hands as she beams up at me, and the love between us is almost palpable. I can still feel the warmth on my face, right this second.
And so I plunge into the pool to swim my laps,on my doomed quest to hold age at bay. The water is unexpectedly chilly and it takes me a few strokes to get my breathing in synch, but the less I think about it the more naturally it comes, and finally I am in the groove: one two three, four five six, and again. It’s late afternoon, and as I turn my head to breathe the sun blinds me for an instant, and I realize that this is another sign of the season: the setting sun gets in your eyes in late afternoon in the far left lap lane. As my vision slides below the surface, the light breaks into dozens of turquoise-rimmed circles which dance below me on the bottom of the pool. It’s late in the day, time to round up the kids and go home. There's a chilly breeze as I get out. It's summer’s way of saying: I am leaving, I am leaving.
